17 ms·

We don't know how bad most things are nor precisely how they're bad

407 points by surprisetalk 2y ago

PaulHoule 2y ago
I showed my wife (who runs a riding academy) a picture of a pretty Chinese girl holding a horse somewhere near the mountains in the West of China and the first thing she noticed was that they'd put the halter on wrong. I was impressed with how AIs would draw individual stitches on clothes but a seamstress friend of mine shook her head and pointed out how they also got it wrong.
- diggan 2y ago
  I spent a really limited amount of time in stalls (mainly because my sister was really into horses and sometimes they let me ride the small ones) but I seem to recall at one point someone talking about halters and how both people and horses have different preferences for how it should be put on, and it also depends on the style/type of halter. Maybe I misremember completely, but doesn't feel too out of place that they'd have different preferences and ways of doing things if you're comparing Eastern ways and Western ways.
  - beedeebeedee 2y ago
    Yeah, and even no halter. No offense to the parent commenter, but things like dressage are driven by defining "right" and "wrong", in order to create an in-group and out-group, and not necessarily to create better riders. You can ride a horse bare back, and in some cases, it really is better than with a saddle (and other accoutrement).
  - Suppafly 2y ago
    Presumably it was 'wrong' in that it was placed in a way that wouldn't work at all, IE objectively wrong not just subjectively wrong.
    - PaulHoule 2y ago
      Specifically one of the straps was twisted 180 degrees before it was clipped on. It certainly looks wrong although I don't imagine it creates distress for the horse.
- joe_the_user 2y ago
  I don't really know anatomy but I'm exposed to anatomy through dance and body work a fair amount. It's not just the fingers but any part of the bodies that AI draws that look wrong to me - if I look carefully. I don't think you necessarily need to be an expert to see the multiple wrongnesses of AI images. It's just that AI images don't signal people to look more closely. (and a lot of popular illustration has bad anatomy and people excuse that). And broadly, I think the division between experts and non-experts in the "telling things are wrong" department is over-emphasized by focus-example chosen in the article. The production of pop-songs, for example, is an area where an expert can make a song more appealing to the average person (objectively verifiable: they create top-ten hits). So the average person can tell a song is well/badly produced when they aren't an expert who can produce songs.
  - PaulHoule 2y ago
    You can't learn to be a good figure artist by looking at flat images, you have to study anatomy, look at skeletons, learn the names of major and minor muscles and otherwise know what's inside. 3-d animated characters in games are good because this knowledge is baked into them.
ZeroGravitas 2y ago
I think with piano tuning, or anything that is historical and physical and analogue and has status, you're going to get lost in human psychology and so miss the real issue. A similar field that has always been digital is audio and video compression codecs. You see similar issues with say Apple advertising their compression as perfect, and devoted hobbyists slaving away to meet goals that the average person cannot even discern. The capitalist, rather than technical, reality is that advances will be used to deliver the same (or lower) quality at a cheaper rate. And if you measure progress by the number of people who can watch Fast and the Furious on their Android phone on a capped data plan in a third world country that is perhaps the best thing. And even if you care only for perfection, despite all the genius and effort applied, you could argue that most of the progress over decades has been the ability to throw more CPU at the problem.
- ineedaj0b 2y ago
  the Japanese seem to have a culture that appreciates the pursuit of perfection, at least in some domains.
  - hooverd 2y ago
    Cheap housing too. You can spend 20 years apprenticing how to make the tamago or whatever when you're not worried about rent.
- PaulHoule 2y ago
  There is also a lot of bullshit about “quality” — like the idea that you could get a significant quality improvement sampling audio at 96k as opposed to 44.1k or 48k. For that matter I can’t believe people’s eyes don’t glaze over when they see TV ads that say, for instance, that Dawn dish detergent is better than other brands even though Dawn really has a better package of surfactants than most competitors and, over time, P&G has invested a lot of research into improving it. (E.g. ultraconcentrated soaps were an advance in practical chemistry and you really can clean more with less soap) Although their ads must be a reason that Dawn is market leading I’m pretty sure the ads, through their style, make a withdrawal from the legitimacy bank account.
blahbluhbley 2y ago
[flagged]
Spivak 2y ago
I'm having a hard time squaring the "don't put this guy out of business because it will become a lost art" with the very real practical goal of "release a digital piano tuner for $2 on the App Store that will make every piano not tuned by this guy-- the ones in school theaters, churches, or sitting rooms, sound better. I can't even imagine what an exorbitant price to a concert hall means but for sure the high school production of Anything Goes can't afford it.
- yogurtboy 2y ago
  I don't think this is the point of the article. In the TL, DR, they allude to the fact that the introduction of general AI into the world will accelerate this, because it will be "$2 app store tuner" on a larger, more intense scale. Doesn't require much through to extrapolate this to different areas. Sure, it would be sad if the expertise on sewing and clothing construction was lost to automation, but it wouldn't be the end of the world. But every person has a hobby that they would be sad to see lose its complexity and art. It might be catastrophic, though, if the world's nuclear engineers began automating their right-tail knowledge away.
- 8note 2y ago
  It sounds like you haven't tuned an instrument with many strings. Tuning one string will change the tuning of the rest. The tuner might tell you the end state, but not how you get there, and it might not be the right tuning for how the piano will be played or the room it will be played in
1970-01-01 2y ago
Befriend anyone that is working full-time in one of the skilled trades (welding, plumbing, masonry, roofer, etc.) and they will tell you precisely how bad the thing is.
- alanbernstein 2y ago
  Or perhaps a piano tuner, as in the article? This comment reads as a counterpoint to the title, while it's actually repeating the point of the article.
- dehrmann 2y ago
  I've worked at companies where the internal vibe among engineering was that the product was shit, but customers loved it. Engineers are looking at parts they know could be better; customers are looking at the competition.
kridsdale1 2y ago
First time I’ve really enjoyed any writing on LessWrong. This felt zen.
- isoprophlex 2y ago
  Yes. Below the article are some tags with numerical values, "complexity: 4", "expertise: 2". Another fitting tag would have been "weaponized pedantry: unusually low"
  - disconcision 2y ago
    and then a "weaponized metapedantry: medium" metatag on the tag itself
    - throw4847285 2y ago
      It's just nice to have them produce a critique of AI that isn't rooted in barely secularized eschatology.
madrox 2y ago
Not sure how I feel about this. As the author acknowledged at the end, the piano tuning maybe was "good enough" in the beginning that no one would really notice the difference. What, then, was the point that leads us to say this piano tuner is essential and should not be replaced by something that can get it tuned to the level it was at the start of this essay? Especially considering not many could afford that piano tuner's exorbitant Sunday rate. We shouldn't pretend ROI doesn't matter. I want to agree with the thesis of the essay, but this anecdote didn't get me there.
- Etheryte 2y ago
  You could say the whole point of art, and mastery in it, is to seek something beyond a "pretty good". The pianist could tell the difference and so could the person tuning the piano. Similar to how you can print a copy of a photograph taken of a master's painting, there is a difference between a "pretty good" and "the best".
  - madrox 2y ago
    Yeah, this has shades of "shining your shoes for the fat lady" to borrow a Salinger reference, and I understand that within the context of performance, but maybe I expect this to generalize farther than it does. There are many domains where a low cost, good enough solution is better. Not everyone can afford a piano tuner's exorbitant Sunday fee...
    - jononor 2y ago
      If we are going to bring cost into it, then digital pianos are superior in term of tuning (one might argue about other aspects of sound and feel). Same tuning every time, no adjustment needed.
      - Suppafly 2y ago
        >If we are going to bring cost into it, then digital pianos are superior in term of tuning (one might argue about other aspects of sound and feel). Same tuning every time, no adjustment needed. I think they tune them slightly differently depending on what's going to be played. But I suppose a master pianist could have a whole database of their preferences saved up or something.
csallen 2y ago
> Only a very few people possess the level of discernment needed to know how bad your local concert hall's piano is, and precisely how it is bad. If their art dies out, maybe nobody will know how bad all the pianos are. And then we'll all have slightly worse pianos than we would otherwise have. And I mean if that's the way things are going to go, then let's just steer the Earth into the Sun, because what's the point of any of this. The problem with this line of thinking -- "If X happens then we'll all be cooked!" -- is that it ignores the fact that X already has been happening and yet life is just fine. There's an infinite number of pursuits in which expert practitioners could theoretically possess a level of discernment so sublime that nobody else can understand it, let alone appreciate it. A huge number of these arts will either never be practiced, or were practiced in the past but have already decline. And yet there's no mass ennui or clamoring to steer the Earth into the sun. The pinnacle of human attention cannot be directed at everything, everywhere, all at once. We have to focus our attention on a limited subset of arts and pursuits, where discernment will always be high, and settle everywhere else.
- tiltowait 2y ago
  It also appears to ignore the fact that pianos had to be invented. The “best” had to be discovered and learned, and can be learned again in the future, even if the present chain of knowledge dies out. Or, not beholden to the past, future generations might determine/discover a new “best”.
  - detourdog 2y ago
    A similar story is often told about really old violins.
    - apercu 2y ago
      I thought that was debunked, that in "blind" tests experts nearly always selected modern, high end violins over the Stradivarius's (Stradivarii?).
      - 2y ago
Vecr 2y ago
> And I mean if that's the way things are going to go, then let's just steer the Earth into the Sun, because what's the point of any of this. That's one hell of a statement for a place like LessWrong.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- diggan 2y ago
  > That's one hell of a statement for a place like LessWrong. Not that I hang out a lot at LessWrong, but it seems like a place for philosophy (and more), from an outsider perspective at least. And nihilism certainly is a perspective some hold within philosophy, so it seems like exactly the right place for a statement like that?
  - Vecr 2y ago
    Nihilism is a terminology debate. Running the planet into the sun because the pianos are out of tune is a physics-based policy proposal. You want your civilization to gracefully degrade as it loses value, rationally shedding components that become untenable. It's likely that at least one person's going to have value up to the very end as your civilization loses resources but still remains rational, something that can't be said if it went into the sun hundreds of years ago.
- dwaltrip 2y ago
  Annihilating all life on Earth because we became worse at tuning pianos? It’s absolutely deranged. They need to get grounded. Workout, sit under a tree, hug a friend, whatever floats their boat.
  - TheRealNGenius 2y ago
    [dead]
  - digging 2y ago
    Deranged? Seriously? Did it not occur to you that the statement was humorous hyperbole, did you actively choose to reject the idea, or are you commenting in bad faith?
zoogeny 2y ago
> Just trust the people who have the best discernment. I don't like that kind of conclusion. For some reason (the context of the article?) it made me think of gold plated digital cables. It's like the old fairy tale of the princess and the pea [1]. Sometimes when people are complaining about some tiny subtlety that we can't recognize ourselves we think they are a princess. Other times, someone tries to convince us they are a princess by pointing out a subtlety that isn't even there. There is likely an objective truth about tuning pianos. I am suspicious when someone claims they have a super-power that cannot be replaced. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Princess_and_the_Pea https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Princess_and_the_Pea
- gosub100 2y ago
  Gold plating has a practical purpose: anti-corrosion. Selling cables with audiophile shenanigans that aren't based in science (or gains that are microscopic and inconsequential) is where you cross the line into bullshit.
gizmo 2y ago
Although this article doesn't make the point explicitly, this is really about how we can't discern right tails. The Olympics nicely illustrate this. In most cases we can only tell which of these world class athletes are best by having them perform side-by-side. But otherwise who can tell by eye if an athlete is top 100 or top 10 worldwide? Even good chess players can't tell by the moves alone what the Elo rating of more skilled players are. We don't know how bad things are is one way to put it. Another way is that there are people of extraordinary ability, walking among us mere mortals.
- joe_the_user 2y ago
  Even good chess players can't tell by the moves alone what the Elo rating of more skilled players are. That's an interesting claim, is there any verification for it? (I'm honestly curious).
  - wavemode 2y ago
    Humans can't analyze chess exhaustively. We do so largely by pattern recognition. As a result, we mostly cannot accurately analyze the chess of players who are significantly stronger than we are. In other words, when a human says "this is a good position for white" or "that was a good move" (roughly equivalent to saying "that move leads to a good position"), we do so not by checking every possible sequence of moves (which would require analyzing billions of possible continuations) and ensuring that all of them are good. We instead do so by intuition - we assess what the position looks like in comparison to positions we've analyzed before that we know lead to a win for one player or the other. As a concrete example: if we see connected passed pawns for white, we're probably going to say white is winning, unless mentally we can find a continuation where black is able to capture them or blockade them. So all it takes for a chess position to be good without a human being able to tell, is for there to exist some sequence of moves that leads to a different result from what we expected, and we are unable to find that sequence. In the example above, a human would wrongly conclude that white is winning if there actually does exist some deep and complicated series of moves black can play to permanently blockade the connected passers. You see this most commonly with chess engines (i.e. chess AI). The engine will make a move, or suggest a move, and the human (who may even be one the top players in the world) raises their eyebrow. Why, because the move visually seems to make no sense and/or serve no purpose. The engine is making that move based on some billion-position analysis it performed, that the human just isn't capable of. Only after the engine ultimately wins the game, does the human go back and start to get a sense of what the purpose of that strange-looking move was.
jmwilson 2y ago
> The space of possible subjects is huge, so on average your discernment is terrible, relative to what it could be. This is a serious problem if you create a machine that does everyone's job for them. It's a problem if you're building systems as a dilettante. There are enough individuals on the planet that people can specialize so we need not be at the mercy of systems built by people of average discernment. > If their art dies out, maybe nobody will know how bad all the pianos are. And then we'll all have slightly worse pianos than we would otherwise have. And I mean if that's the way things are going to go, then let's just steer the Earth into the Sun, because what's the point of any of this. One counterexample to this viewpoint is Damascus steel. The exact art of making it has been lost (although now effectively reproduced), but modern steels surpass the qualities that made Damascus steel prized. It turns out those ancient masters didn't know bad their steel was. Maybe modern piano tuners don't know how bad their technique is, once the process of "finessing how the overtones interact with each other" has been thoroughly characterized by present or future technology.
- Loughla 2y ago
  I thought that it was precisely because ancient masters knew how poor their steel was that Damascus even became a thing. Is that not correct? I have always read that it was a technique to overcome bad base metal.
  - bluGill 2y ago
    Pretty much. We know how it was produced, but we have better steel available and so nobody is willing to go through that much work to produce an inferior product. If you want a good sword you start with good modern steel and treat it like the book says - which includes give it as little time in the furnace as you can get by while shaping it. If you want a sword that looks pretty you can cheat to apply decorations that look like Damascus from a distance and that is good enough (you might or might not start with good steel, but if you do it is better than a real Damascus sword). Nobody has the patience to do things the old way as there is no advantage to it. If the old way actually had advantages someone would do it. In the case of Damascus we have enough science to know it wasn't as good. There are other areas where people to go through the effort to create something the old way - either it isn't much more work (it may be more work, just not too much more), or the old way is somehow better.
huijzer 2y ago
Very true. My favorite example of this is academia. When you do a MSc everything seems nice and some things feel a bit weird but it is what it is. Then over time you realize how misaligned the incentives are with what is actually useful for the general population. But the whole system is writing with much jargon and emphasizing that they followed all procedures and peer-review. So the population thinks it must be useful, or at least cannot point out why it isn’t.
BiteCode_dev 2y ago
Remind me of the florida keys syndrom where each generation think it's a great fishing spot but doesn't have a frame of reference for how much the fishes actually became less numerous and smaller: https://earimediaprodweb.azurewebsites.net/Api/v1/Multimedia/4404375b-5eed-431b-adb2-a465ba433c57/Rendition/low-res/Content/Public https://earimediaprodweb.azurewebsites.net/Api/v1/Multimedia...
- keiferski 2y ago
  I get this feeling a lot when reading old books. People used to be…more interesting? Or at least there were more interesting places like Paris in the 20s. Today the “artistic” hubs in the world feel boring compared to NYC in the 80s or Paris circa 1890-1930, but you wouldn’t know it if you didn’t read the older books.
  - renewiltord 2y ago
    That's just a property of the fact that the interesting people all know each other and the uninteresting people don't know them. In some sense, Sam Altman, Emmett Shear, Eliezer Yudkowsky, Paul Graham, Elon Musk, John Carmack are in a shared sphere. And they are interesting whether you think they are smart or not. You don't hear about John-Pierre Duvage from the coffee shop because he wasn't interesting. In the future, they will talk about the places where these people met. Groupies always wonder where the musicians are. The musicians find each other easily.
    - keiferski 2y ago
      Those people you mentioned are interesting and intelligent but I wouldn’t call them artistic, or diverse intellectually. And more importantly they aren’t “a scene”, in a physical place, like Paris or lower Manhattan were.
      - renewiltord 2y ago
        Their sphere almost certainly include the rest that those outside barely know of. For every well-known Aella in the group, there is someone more strange and esoteric with local influence only within. The strange and interesting are never as legible to their contemporaries as they are to those who come after because one's influence is only clear after one has sufficiently influenced. A thing that strikes me is that people in the Bay Area frequently claim that it has nothing interesting, but my friends hosted a 30-person event locally that had musical compositions, art, and talks about all sorts of things. A local festival. No one outside us knew. I suspect that, like us, there are numerous groups of people out there and that this sort of stuff is common. Only those with breakout ideas make it out, but the groups themselves comprise individuals who, if you teased out their tales, would make good stories. If my friend groups span libertarian billionaire techies and union working-class ironworkers, I must assume that the rest of these groups are similarly diverse. For my part, I have found the Bay Area a fascinating place full of fascinating people. I am thankful to have found my way here. Sometimes I think not even Moll Flanders has lived more exciting a life than many of those I have met here.
ChrisMarshallNY 2y ago
> If their art dies out, maybe nobody will know how bad all the pianos are. I'm already seeing this happening in a number of industries (including software development). It starts with the consumers accepting crap, and works its way back. That's why I think AI-produced output will be just fine, for most folks.
- vundercind 2y ago
  The vast majority of content that entertains people online is just the Nokia Snake Game but for writing or film. Near-zero-value time-wasters. Hard to make it much worse or ruin it when it’s already worth about as much as used tissue paper. That’s also why I don’t relate to concerns about what might happen to the Web without ad revenue—nearly all of what that pays for has nearly zero value and is easily replaced by plentiful other low-value things. (Yes, I do include this comment among the low-value junk)
  - pimlottc 2y ago
    That’s an insult to Nokia Snake. Nokia Snake doesn’t have ads, loot boxes, in-app purchases, collectibles, social media integration or any of dozens of other dark pattern that are practically standard in casual games now.
    - vundercind 2y ago
      Oh, it’s not shittified, I just mean it’s a way to pass the time that’s basically interchangeable with tons and tons of other ways to pass the time. That’s most of what people do on the Web, and that’s what most of the content’s for. It’s all solitaire (the real card game) or reading the magazines in the doctor’s waiting room. Just something to do.
- Suppafly 2y ago
  >I'm already seeing this happening in a number of industries (including software development). It comes up in all sorts of unexpected places in technology, once things are overly optimized for price often the original better version goes away. Like right now you can't buy a good cassette tape player, because the only ones made now all use the same mechanism that sucks. They stopped making good mechanisms like 20 years ago when people mostly stopped buying cassettes.
yogurtboy 2y ago
A lot of people commenting are referring to hobbyist art, like TFA's piano tuning, or audio cables, or sewing equestrian tack. The point (that the article alludes to but definitely does not spell out) is that, with the advent of general AI, this style of artistry will die in EVERY field if we allow it to; not just art and media, but engineering, technology, policy too. This to me is a HUGE problem with the introduction of these consumer-ready AIs. You may be able to say "agh I'm an engineer and I wouldn't let this happen in my project!" but some places just want their dang power plants, whether or not they have a host of lifelong nuclear engineering in their region. I worry about a power plant that has a fault when the only true experts are few and far between.
- Spivak 2y ago
  What do you think makes AI special? Technology advances have been killing artisans in every field for as long as we've had them.
  - beedeebeedee 2y ago
    These new AI tools have the potential to be more personally comprehensive and have more widespread adoption than slavery and other forms of servitude. The loss of skill (or lack of development) that the parent commenter is referring to has been discussed as widely as Hegel's master-slave dialectic to Idiocracy. Individuals and cultures that use these tools to replace the innate tools they have developed become qualitatively less sophisticated, unless they are pressured by some other external need, or their own self-mastery. I suspect we will have a mix of all these situations across fields and cultures that adopt these new AI tools, and will need to focus on not only making the tools better, but pressuring ourselves to be better (i.e., we replaced physical labor through previous tools, but have only partly accommodated that lack of physical development through gym culture, sports, and more back to the earth activities like hiking- personal transportation being one of the first things to get replaced by new tools like domesticated animals, bikes and cars). If it happens too fast, or we have other catastrophes, we might need to bring back non-military conscription focused on the environment (as in William James's lecture on the Moral Equivalent of War), in order to prop up our nation state and technological culture that it has provided the foundation for.
dsjoerg 2y ago
We don't know how different, and how good, things can be until we try. Until some of us invest in discernment, invest in the art of it, and the rest of us give it a listen or a look. Some cultures end up adopting the new level of discernment wholesale. And in some cultures, the refinement slowly slips away and things revert back to the sloppy, lazy, easier-to-sustain base level. As others have noted, our time and attention are finite. Both as producers and consumers of culture. I care about some things and ignore others, both as a producer and a consumer. We individually and collectively choose which aspects of life get the attention and the love. These are the aesthetics of life.
JackFr 2y ago
There is an alternate explanation. The piano is fine. The soloist is an asshole and likes to make people jump through hoops. The conductor does or doesn't realize this, but either way doesn't want to upset the soloist. The piano tuner knows the piano is fine but doesn't mind getting paid so plays along. The author plays along, unwilling to point out them emperor has no clothes.
- skybrian 2y ago
  The piano tuner didn’t need to explain what they were doing, though, and they’re not being paid any more to fake that.
mordae 2y ago
1. If we really need consistently good piano sound quality, maybe we should replace the unreliable pianos overly susceptible to humidity and wear with computer synthesizers that can be told exactly how to sound? I mean that leaves just the speaker housing and wear on the input interface. 2. Maybe music is actually a hobby and not really necessary to be produced reliably. Maybe the fun is in the negotiation with instruments and people? If the priority is a diverse, fun, culture, maybe don't structure all economy and politics around the idea forcing people to justify their existence.
wildermuthn 2y ago
Counterpoint — good-enough technology prevents over-optimization, where we pay too high of a cost for too-marginal gains. It is generally better to reduce the cost of a 98% solution than to maintain the cost of a 99% solution. There will be exceptions for domains that require a 100% solution, but piano tuning is not one of them.
- aners_xyz 2y ago
  In most cases piano tuners are probably operating within the confines of what’s realistic with regards to cost and time. I mean even in this post they did exactly that. Not sure the point you are making
Aardwolf 2y ago
> 'God's prank on musicians' (where He cruelly rigged the structure of reality such that (3/2)^n!=2^m for any integers n, m but IT'S SO CLOSE CMON MAN) What exactly is this about? Other than (3/2)^12 being 129.7 which is somewhat close to 2^7 I don't see much other being close. Also, musician's mathematics are so weird, talking about '11' while there are 12 notes, '5th' while no 5 is involved, ...
- vaylian 2y ago
  There seems to be something missing from the problem statement. If I can choose any integers n, m, then I will just choose n=m=0 which gives a trivial equation.
  - 8note 2y ago
    That says the issue though. The only time you can tune a piano is when the frequency is 0 - that is, that there's no sound being played
    - recursive 2y ago
      Doesn't mean that. 2^0 is non-zero. I interpret it to mean that every note must have the same non-zero frequency. In other words, the ratio between any two notes is 2^0 = 1.
- 331c8c71 2y ago
  3:2 is the perfect fifth. 2:1 is the octave. Hence if you climb (or descend) by perfect fifths you never align with the notes you get if you climb (descend) by octaves. Look up "just intonation" and "equal temperament" if you are interested. Also "The Well-Tempered Clavier" is highly recommended for listening!
  - heikkilevanto 2y ago
    Just a side note: "The Well-Tempered Clavier" is not at all the same as the "Equally Tuned Piano". Bach was certainly aware of the equal tuning, where all intervals were the same. It had been used on lutes for some centuries. But with harpsichords, and to some extent pipe organs, an equal temperament was not what Bach or his contemporaries wanted - it didn't have a single pure interval!
renewiltord 2y ago
It's going to be okay. The wonder of the Internet is that you can create small communities found among the billions that inhabit the Earth. And your communities can create small areas of deep interest. The drive to make something a certain way is built into many of us as humans. It will not break in the face of some degree of standard quality. As an example of a triviality: Costco has pens to put your cart in. They also have people going around retrieving carts. They then have a tractor move the carts to where people can take them into the store. Many people leave their carts in the pens. Some do not. The other day, the carts were overflowing from the pen I'd walked to, but I could see the reason was that there were two carts misaligned deep in the pen. A valid and reasonable thing to do is to have gone to a different pen. Many would have accepted adding my cart to the overflow as well. But a desire for order caused me to realign the carts and solve the overflow. If I had not, nothing much would have gone wrong. Because I did, no greater result was created. I am paid a large sum of money and any marginal additional time I spend I can create more money (since I work in HFT). The cart wrangler is paid very little. It is not comparatively advantageous. The work was wasted work, in some sense. But I had to do it. I was compelled to do so. This is a useless thing, but there are people who feel that desire I felt there who will feel it for other things. To make a better-sounding piano, the perfect dish, to master joinery. And things will be good for them and those they serve. And that is good. And that is enough. Because total utility is the integral of utility across all. And less individual over more participants can sum to higher overall utility.
mattgreenrocks 2y ago
This is another instance of an insidious modern meme that states that people with non-mainstream skill X should be okay with it dying out because it's not mainstream. It's just a long-winded way to call something irrelevant without actually saying that. But we know we can't call it that, so we dress it up in pseudo-intellectual bullshit, citing "pragmatism" and using misdirection: "oh, but who can actually appreciate such an obscure thing?" It's exceedingly presumptuous on the speaker's part. The world's a big place, but it's only as big as we perceive it to be. Don't let people who need it to be smaller tell you what to think.
kazinator 2y ago
Hearing things the easy part. The finer you split the hair, the harder it is to actually translate that to a tuning action, with a piano. There are no fine-grained worm gears in the tuning pegs. The pegs are just metal sticks stuck into a hole, prevented from rotating (going flat) by static friction. You cannot adjust them smoothly; when you turn them with the tuning wrench (properly called a "tuning hammer"!) you must overcome static friction to make them move. At that point, they will jump. If you're looking to make a very fine adjustment, it will be almost certainly overshot. So you must do something like jump to a sharper pitch, and from there try to relax it by jumping down to the target pitch. (And that also results in better tuning stability: lower likelihood it will slip.) If the target is very narrowly defined, this can take multiple attempts. The piano has 88 keys, the bulk of which have three strings: have fun!
- pas 2y ago
  ... but why? sure gears - like on guitars - would be probably too big and wouldn't fit[0], right? (and/or too expensive) but they could put the knobs on the top of the peg ... the gear could be inside, and as it is rotated it could push out small cams or "break pads" to make a wedge[1], same friction would make sure the pin stays in place and does not rotate, but no need for the hammering. of course probably because of acoustic this or that having solid pins is "much" better? [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Piano_tuning_lever_that_is_on_a_tuning_pin_with_hammer_striking_a_string_in_an_acoustic_grand_piano.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Piano_tuning_lever_that_i... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molly_(fastener) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molly_(fastener)
stcredzero 2y ago
If their art dies out, maybe nobody will know how bad all the pianos are. And then we'll all have slightly worse pianos than we would otherwise have. And I mean if that's the way things are going to go, then let's just steer the Earth into the Sun, because what's the point of any of this. I think a similar thing happened to journalism ethics over the course of the 20th century up through the 1st quarter of the 21st. The XKCD counterpoint: https://xkcd.com/915/ https://xkcd.com/915/ (I think this shows how arrogant Randall Munroe can be sometimes. He does a lot of great stuff, but when he's wrong, he's egregiously so!)
- 8note 2y ago
  If you extend your journalism one back a quarter, you lose that trend, instead, we start and end with the fine art of creating click bait. Yellow journalists followed by Buzzfeed bloggers
patrickhogan1 2y ago
AI scales expert discernment
sirspacey 2y ago
We’ve already lost a tremendous amount of craft over the last 1,000 years. There are almost no craftspeople left in the world who can do the kind of moldings & designs you see in renaissance era buildings. Having been a classical musician, what I noticed about getting tuning right is there is a body sensation of lightness/breath that is palpable if you are a classical enthusiast - even if you can’t distinguish the sound you are hearing from an “ideal memory” of what it should sound like. But the largest reduction in auditory tech has already happened - mp3 compression. Uncompressed audio is radically different and richer than low fi digital compression, but almost everything we hear everywhere is coming through streaming services. The rare delights of extreme tech built around the first principles of a discipline like sound/music are achieved by overcoming very difficult and confounding problems. They are technical wonders as much as they are refined experiences. I once worked with a scientist who had permanently solved the issue of mic feedback. Imagine what revolution that would be for AV use cases everywhere! But it required a radical shift in the protocols used to build both mic and speakers, so even though Sony optioned it there’s not a single product you can buy with the tech. Like the Internet, everything is really just a semi-poor adaptation to a semi-poorly design system. Fundamental protocol changes (like ipv4 to ipv6) are brutally hard. We like to believe that modern society is hard-wired for improvement, but it seems mostly hard-wired for minimal change that delivers marginal improvements detectable by the lowest common denominator consumer/user. To me, that makes it all the more extraordinary when genuine protocol level changes - like EV cars - are made reality.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- austin-cheney 2y ago
  Just in renaissance? There is virtually nobody left in the workforce that can write JavaScript. Most of the old timers have gotten out, and the youngsters are an epic example of the article: the loss of perspective to self-reflect due to a machine (library) that does their jobs for them. Case in point: take React and querySelectors away and watch the sadness unfold like an apocalypse movie. Yes, yes, I know there are still people who can/do write JavaScript... they just are not statistically represented in the workforce.
akira2501 2y ago
> Your discernment in a subject often improves as you dedicate time and attention to that subject. The space of possible subjects is huge, so on average your discernment is terrible, relative to what it could be. This is a serious problem if you create a machine that does everyone's job for them. This is the "first level" of expertise. Yes, you will notice this as you delve into more and more areas, but you also find there are a lot of common modes and human patterns that inextricably become part of the subject matter. Having a grasp on this allows you to very quickly get to the intermediate level in most subjects. Consequently, this is why I dislike modern math's continued fascination with Greek symbols, when Greek or Latin is not taught anymore. It creates an artificial barrier to entry that's very frustrating.
- auggierose 2y ago
  I find German letters much more problematic. Greek symbols are very readable.
  - akira2501 2y ago
    Admittedly.. these days it's much easier. In the 1990s and prior to unicode it was a small nightmare. It's the same issue that Wikipedia still generally uses generated images to display equations, so unless you know the name of the symbol or can type it, you're going to have a hard time finding any reference to it.
- FrojoS 2y ago
  I'm not sure I follow. What symbols should be used for variables? Once you run out of all characters in the Latin alphabet, you either use another one or you have to resort to subscripts, hyperscript etc.
steelframe 2y ago
Having grown up in the generation of DVDs and Blu-rays I'm cursed with the inability to ignore streaming video compression artifacts such as blocking, banding, and ringing. They alone can get me annoyed enough that it breaks my engagement with the film. Any sort of hiccup from packet loss resulting in complete distortion of the video or buffering sends me into a "fsck this sh!t" rage. It completely ruins the experience for me. That means I will never watch a film that I really care about via streaming. I don't have a lot of time to watch films these days, so when I do I always opt for a physical disc to make sure I actually enjoy the experience. In addition I've noticed that it often costs $20 to "rent" a new release via streaming and $30 to buy an actual disc, so it doesn't make any financial sense to me at all to "rent" a crap streaming experience for 2/3 of the cost of buying a high-quality copy of the film. But now there's another problem. I've noticed that many films being released today are streaming-only. One I looked at last week could be "rented" from a streaming service for $20, "bought" from said streaming service for $30, or bought on physical media in JULY 2025. That's right, an entire year from now. In years past I've frequently made it a habit to head down to the local Target in the late afternoon to see what new releases they have in the electronics department. However the last time I went there the Blu-ray section had been completely removed. No doubt because studios are no longer releasing new films on Blu-ray until a motherfscking YEAR after they make it available on streaming. When I asked an associate where the films were he apologetically stammered, "Uh, yeah, sorry, we're, uh, turning down our film section. There are a few stragglers left at the end of the aisle over there." Now there is no way for me to legally get a new release film that I can tolerate watching within a reasonable amount of time. I would garner that it's primarily an artifact (no pun intended) of the current generation having grown up with crap streaming videos, and so they are adapted to it and don't have expectations for quality like those of us from the DVD and Blu-ray generation have. I suppose this is another way it goes to show that knowing how bad most things are and precisely how they're bad is more a curse than a blessing. As I walked out of Target empty-handed I admit I did have a feeling somewhat like wanting the Earth to be steered into the sun. And then I jumped on VPN and pirated the film I wanted to watch.
- dimatura 2y ago
  For what it's worth, I recently visited a thrift store and I was somewhat surprised to see a sizable DVD/bluray section. I imagine there won't be any new releases there, though.
moi2388 2y ago
What an absolutely lovely little read that was
beryilma 2y ago
If Keith Jarrett can produce such a sublime music as his Köln Concert on a broken piano, perhaps the level of perfection mentioned in the article is just professional pedantry. After all, isn't an artist a better artist when they can use their medium to maximum effect no matter its imperfections. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_K%C3%B6ln_Concert https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_K%C3%B6ln_Concert
- lalalandland 2y ago
  I was thinking the same. Technical perfection and artistic perfection on a Venn diagram are two not entirely overlapping circles
  - biztos 2y ago
    Two great examples from art are Michelangelo (look at the women) and Caravaggio (look carefully at anything).
- defrost 2y ago
  I came looking for this and should add that his broken piano concert is the number one global best selling piano album. How a total disaster became the world’s best-selling piano album https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wIXMkZAcgRo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wIXMkZAcgRo
micromacrofoot 2y ago
Sometimes precision dies, no one cares, and that's ok. There are vanishingly few people who can maintain pipe organs, which is ok because historically speaking relatively few people want to listen to pipe organs anymore. We can't prioritize everything all the time forever.
agnos 2y ago
This reminds me of the current research in ML of "simplifying" models for inference (pruning, distillation, etc.). Our model of reality is so imprecise, can we be confident that all the local details are insignificant to the global context?
semanticjudo 2y ago
Reminds me of the narcissism of small differences: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narcissism_of_small_differences https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narcissism_of_small_differen... Few people will care because only a few are capable of caring and the world keeps on turning.
exitzer0 2y ago
It only takes a single visit to an old house built around the turn of century to realize that the artistry, craftsmanship, and all of the other skills needed to make such a thing today are incredibly rare. Everyone seems to think and say that they want some for of AI to arrive and free us from all that grind that is beneath us. I am just reminded of this TNG episode. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mA9fcTJGXf0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mA9fcTJGXf0
- Spellman 2y ago
  This is classic Survivorship Bias
bena 2y ago
People like the piano tuner in question are the kinds of people I love talking to and watching work. They know these tiny minute details of things most of us only have a gross understanding of. They know the ins and outs of the craft they've chosen and have a true joy in working it.
leshow 2y ago
The book "Blood in the Machine: The Origins of the Rebellion Against Big Tech" covers lots of stories like this from the industrial revolution. The luddites resisted having their work taken over by machines. The machines produced worse quality, but were cheaper and lowered the skill level required to do the work. It also made output predictable, allowed people to be bunched into factories and enabled child labour and other kinds of exploitation. At the time people resisted having their autonomy taken away by smashing the machines and burning factories. It's a great book that will surprise you with how similar many of the situations we deal with today are. I know the post is about "discernment", but I think the author kind of missed the real issue. It's about automation making things shitty, so that society can be reshaped to maximize profit extraction. We _could_ live in a world that strikes a balance between the relentless drive to automate and a more humanistic approach, but that would require structural changes.
Slava_Propanei 2y ago
[dead]
cyanydeez 2y ago
Is the inverse much much more concerning. Like vaccines, we have very little idea just howngood it is to identify preventBle dieseases and reduce suffering
8bitsrule 2y ago
This article came along just as I'm finally digging into *Lost Technologies of Ancient Egypt." This article reminded me of more than one passage from Dunn ... I'll quote a couple here. [Dunn 'quoting' a sculpture:]"Don't just gape in awe and wonder, shake your head, and walk away. Bring me back to life! Know me -- who I was and what I was. The only way to do this is to understand what I am and build another! Why am I smiling? Don't think for a minute that I am content sitting here on my pedastal, misunderstood by the droves that have passed by for centuries. There is more here than meets the eye." Dunn now: "Words cannot describe my feelings of wonder and awe as I absorbed from the temples not only a philosophical and spiritual aspect but also with my engineer's brain. These temples impressed upon me indelibly that they were incredibly important from an engineering and scientific perspective. " It seems to me that nearly all of us are forced to walk through most of life in this way ... not because we're deliberatly ignorant ... because we can only truly see, and resonate with, that which is within the scope of our varied expertises (be they one or five). To all else we must remain largely blind, part of the misunderstanding droves ... unless someone with regard for the nuances comes along to let us inside long enough to catch -that glimpse-.
nullc 2y ago
We don't know how good most things are nor precisely how they're good
hoseja 2y ago
"why don't you use a fancy electronic tuner for this, and just have a table to look up the frequencies for each string, and tune it that way?" "..." There just aren't tuners fancy enough IMO. Make one with a high resolution spectrogram, I think the piano tuner person would actually appreciate that. So much subtle detail in a spectrogram. edit: there's a discussion below the essay on some just such very fancy tuners.

407 points by surprisetalk 2y ago

I showed my wife (who runs a riding academy) a picture of a pretty Chinese girl holding a horse somewhere near the mountains in the West of China and the first thing she noticed was that they'd put the halter on wrong. I was impressed with how AIs would draw individual stitches on clothes but a seamstress friend of mine shook her head and pointed out how they also got it wrong.

diggan 2y ago
I spent a really limited amount of time in stalls (mainly because my sister was really into horses and sometimes they let me ride the small ones) but I seem to recall at one point someone talking about halters and how both people and horses have different preferences for how it should be put on, and it also depends on the style/type of halter. Maybe I misremember completely, but doesn't feel too out of place that they'd have different preferences and ways of doing things if you're comparing Eastern ways and Western ways.
- beedeebeedee 2y ago
  Yeah, and even no halter. No offense to the parent commenter, but things like dressage are driven by defining "right" and "wrong", in order to create an in-group and out-group, and not necessarily to create better riders. You can ride a horse bare back, and in some cases, it really is better than with a saddle (and other accoutrement).
- Suppafly 2y ago
  Presumably it was 'wrong' in that it was placed in a way that wouldn't work at all, IE objectively wrong not just subjectively wrong.
  - PaulHoule 2y ago
    Specifically one of the straps was twisted 180 degrees before it was clipped on. It certainly looks wrong although I don't imagine it creates distress for the horse.
joe_the_user 2y ago
I don't really know anatomy but I'm exposed to anatomy through dance and body work a fair amount. It's not just the fingers but any part of the bodies that AI draws that look wrong to me - if I look carefully. I don't think you necessarily need to be an expert to see the multiple wrongnesses of AI images. It's just that AI images don't signal people to look more closely. (and a lot of popular illustration has bad anatomy and people excuse that). And broadly, I think the division between experts and non-experts in the "telling things are wrong" department is over-emphasized by focus-example chosen in the article. The production of pop-songs, for example, is an area where an expert can make a song more appealing to the average person (objectively verifiable: they create top-ten hits). So the average person can tell a song is well/badly produced when they aren't an expert who can produce songs.
- PaulHoule 2y ago
  You can't learn to be a good figure artist by looking at flat images, you have to study anatomy, look at skeletons, learn the names of major and minor muscles and otherwise know what's inside. 3-d animated characters in games are good because this knowledge is baked into them.

ZeroGravitas 2y ago

I think with piano tuning, or anything that is historical and physical and analogue and has status, you're going to get lost in human psychology and so miss the real issue. A similar field that has always been digital is audio and video compression codecs. You see similar issues with say Apple advertising their compression as perfect, and devoted hobbyists slaving away to meet goals that the average person cannot even discern. The capitalist, rather than technical, reality is that advances will be used to deliver the same (or lower) quality at a cheaper rate. And if you measure progress by the number of people who can watch Fast and the Furious on their Android phone on a capped data plan in a third world country that is perhaps the best thing. And even if you care only for perfection, despite all the genius and effort applied, you could argue that most of the progress over decades has been the ability to throw more CPU at the problem.

ineedaj0b 2y ago
the Japanese seem to have a culture that appreciates the pursuit of perfection, at least in some domains.
- hooverd 2y ago
  Cheap housing too. You can spend 20 years apprenticing how to make the tamago or whatever when you're not worried about rent.
PaulHoule 2y ago
There is also a lot of bullshit about “quality” — like the idea that you could get a significant quality improvement sampling audio at 96k as opposed to 44.1k or 48k. For that matter I can’t believe people’s eyes don’t glaze over when they see TV ads that say, for instance, that Dawn dish detergent is better than other brands even though Dawn really has a better package of surfactants than most competitors and, over time, P&G has invested a lot of research into improving it. (E.g. ultraconcentrated soaps were an advance in practical chemistry and you really can clean more with less soap) Although their ads must be a reason that Dawn is market leading I’m pretty sure the ads, through their style, make a withdrawal from the legitimacy bank account.

blahbluhbley 2y ago

[flagged]

Spivak 2y ago

I'm having a hard time squaring the "don't put this guy out of business because it will become a lost art" with the very real practical goal of "release a digital piano tuner for $2 on the App Store that will make every piano not tuned by this guy-- the ones in school theaters, churches, or sitting rooms, sound better. I can't even imagine what an exorbitant price to a concert hall means but for sure the high school production of Anything Goes can't afford it.

yogurtboy 2y ago
I don't think this is the point of the article. In the TL, DR, they allude to the fact that the introduction of general AI into the world will accelerate this, because it will be "$2 app store tuner" on a larger, more intense scale. Doesn't require much through to extrapolate this to different areas. Sure, it would be sad if the expertise on sewing and clothing construction was lost to automation, but it wouldn't be the end of the world. But every person has a hobby that they would be sad to see lose its complexity and art. It might be catastrophic, though, if the world's nuclear engineers began automating their right-tail knowledge away.
8note 2y ago
It sounds like you haven't tuned an instrument with many strings. Tuning one string will change the tuning of the rest. The tuner might tell you the end state, but not how you get there, and it might not be the right tuning for how the piano will be played or the room it will be played in

1970-01-01 2y ago

Befriend anyone that is working full-time in one of the skilled trades (welding, plumbing, masonry, roofer, etc.) and they will tell you precisely how bad the thing is.

alanbernstein 2y ago
Or perhaps a piano tuner, as in the article? This comment reads as a counterpoint to the title, while it's actually repeating the point of the article.
dehrmann 2y ago
I've worked at companies where the internal vibe among engineering was that the product was shit, but customers loved it. Engineers are looking at parts they know could be better; customers are looking at the competition.

kridsdale1 2y ago

First time I’ve really enjoyed any writing on LessWrong. This felt zen.

isoprophlex 2y ago
Yes. Below the article are some tags with numerical values, "complexity: 4", "expertise: 2". Another fitting tag would have been "weaponized pedantry: unusually low"
- disconcision 2y ago
  and then a "weaponized metapedantry: medium" metatag on the tag itself
  - throw4847285 2y ago
    It's just nice to have them produce a critique of AI that isn't rooted in barely secularized eschatology.

madrox 2y ago

Not sure how I feel about this. As the author acknowledged at the end, the piano tuning maybe was "good enough" in the beginning that no one would really notice the difference. What, then, was the point that leads us to say this piano tuner is essential and should not be replaced by something that can get it tuned to the level it was at the start of this essay? Especially considering not many could afford that piano tuner's exorbitant Sunday rate. We shouldn't pretend ROI doesn't matter. I want to agree with the thesis of the essay, but this anecdote didn't get me there.

Etheryte 2y ago
You could say the whole point of art, and mastery in it, is to seek something beyond a "pretty good". The pianist could tell the difference and so could the person tuning the piano. Similar to how you can print a copy of a photograph taken of a master's painting, there is a difference between a "pretty good" and "the best".
- madrox 2y ago
  Yeah, this has shades of "shining your shoes for the fat lady" to borrow a Salinger reference, and I understand that within the context of performance, but maybe I expect this to generalize farther than it does. There are many domains where a low cost, good enough solution is better. Not everyone can afford a piano tuner's exorbitant Sunday fee...
  - jononor 2y ago
    If we are going to bring cost into it, then digital pianos are superior in term of tuning (one might argue about other aspects of sound and feel). Same tuning every time, no adjustment needed.
    - Suppafly 2y ago
      >If we are going to bring cost into it, then digital pianos are superior in term of tuning (one might argue about other aspects of sound and feel). Same tuning every time, no adjustment needed. I think they tune them slightly differently depending on what's going to be played. But I suppose a master pianist could have a whole database of their preferences saved up or something.

csallen 2y ago

> Only a very few people possess the level of discernment needed to know how bad your local concert hall's piano is, and precisely how it is bad. If their art dies out, maybe nobody will know how bad all the pianos are. And then we'll all have slightly worse pianos than we would otherwise have. And I mean if that's the way things are going to go, then let's just steer the Earth into the Sun, because what's the point of any of this. The problem with this line of thinking -- "If X happens then we'll all be cooked!" -- is that it ignores the fact that X already has been happening and yet life is just fine. There's an infinite number of pursuits in which expert practitioners could theoretically possess a level of discernment so sublime that nobody else can understand it, let alone appreciate it. A huge number of these arts will either never be practiced, or were practiced in the past but have already decline. And yet there's no mass ennui or clamoring to steer the Earth into the sun. The pinnacle of human attention cannot be directed at everything, everywhere, all at once. We have to focus our attention on a limited subset of arts and pursuits, where discernment will always be high, and settle everywhere else.

tiltowait 2y ago
It also appears to ignore the fact that pianos had to be invented. The “best” had to be discovered and learned, and can be learned again in the future, even if the present chain of knowledge dies out. Or, not beholden to the past, future generations might determine/discover a new “best”.
- detourdog 2y ago
  A similar story is often told about really old violins.
  - apercu 2y ago
    I thought that was debunked, that in "blind" tests experts nearly always selected modern, high end violins over the Stradivarius's (Stradivarii?).
    - 2y ago

Vecr 2y ago

> And I mean if that's the way things are going to go, then let's just steer the Earth into the Sun, because what's the point of any of this. That's one hell of a statement for a place like LessWrong.

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
diggan 2y ago
> That's one hell of a statement for a place like LessWrong. Not that I hang out a lot at LessWrong, but it seems like a place for philosophy (and more), from an outsider perspective at least. And nihilism certainly is a perspective some hold within philosophy, so it seems like exactly the right place for a statement like that?
- Vecr 2y ago
  Nihilism is a terminology debate. Running the planet into the sun because the pianos are out of tune is a physics-based policy proposal. You want your civilization to gracefully degrade as it loses value, rationally shedding components that become untenable. It's likely that at least one person's going to have value up to the very end as your civilization loses resources but still remains rational, something that can't be said if it went into the sun hundreds of years ago.
dwaltrip 2y ago
Annihilating all life on Earth because we became worse at tuning pianos? It’s absolutely deranged. They need to get grounded. Workout, sit under a tree, hug a friend, whatever floats their boat.
- TheRealNGenius 2y ago
  [dead]
- digging 2y ago
  Deranged? Seriously? Did it not occur to you that the statement was humorous hyperbole, did you actively choose to reject the idea, or are you commenting in bad faith?

zoogeny 2y ago

> Just trust the people who have the best discernment. I don't like that kind of conclusion. For some reason (the context of the article?) it made me think of gold plated digital cables. It's like the old fairy tale of the princess and the pea [1]. Sometimes when people are complaining about some tiny subtlety that we can't recognize ourselves we think they are a princess. Other times, someone tries to convince us they are a princess by pointing out a subtlety that isn't even there. There is likely an objective truth about tuning pianos. I am suspicious when someone claims they have a super-power that cannot be replaced. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Princess_and_the_Pea https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Princess_and_the_Pea

gosub100 2y ago
Gold plating has a practical purpose: anti-corrosion. Selling cables with audiophile shenanigans that aren't based in science (or gains that are microscopic and inconsequential) is where you cross the line into bullshit.

gizmo 2y ago

Although this article doesn't make the point explicitly, this is really about how we can't discern right tails. The Olympics nicely illustrate this. In most cases we can only tell which of these world class athletes are best by having them perform side-by-side. But otherwise who can tell by eye if an athlete is top 100 or top 10 worldwide? Even good chess players can't tell by the moves alone what the Elo rating of more skilled players are. We don't know how bad things are is one way to put it. Another way is that there are people of extraordinary ability, walking among us mere mortals.

joe_the_user 2y ago
Even good chess players can't tell by the moves alone what the Elo rating of more skilled players are. That's an interesting claim, is there any verification for it? (I'm honestly curious).
- wavemode 2y ago
  Humans can't analyze chess exhaustively. We do so largely by pattern recognition. As a result, we mostly cannot accurately analyze the chess of players who are significantly stronger than we are. In other words, when a human says "this is a good position for white" or "that was a good move" (roughly equivalent to saying "that move leads to a good position"), we do so not by checking every possible sequence of moves (which would require analyzing billions of possible continuations) and ensuring that all of them are good. We instead do so by intuition - we assess what the position looks like in comparison to positions we've analyzed before that we know lead to a win for one player or the other. As a concrete example: if we see connected passed pawns for white, we're probably going to say white is winning, unless mentally we can find a continuation where black is able to capture them or blockade them. So all it takes for a chess position to be good without a human being able to tell, is for there to exist some sequence of moves that leads to a different result from what we expected, and we are unable to find that sequence. In the example above, a human would wrongly conclude that white is winning if there actually does exist some deep and complicated series of moves black can play to permanently blockade the connected passers. You see this most commonly with chess engines (i.e. chess AI). The engine will make a move, or suggest a move, and the human (who may even be one the top players in the world) raises their eyebrow. Why, because the move visually seems to make no sense and/or serve no purpose. The engine is making that move based on some billion-position analysis it performed, that the human just isn't capable of. Only after the engine ultimately wins the game, does the human go back and start to get a sense of what the purpose of that strange-looking move was.

jmwilson 2y ago

> The space of possible subjects is huge, so on average your discernment is terrible, relative to what it could be. This is a serious problem if you create a machine that does everyone's job for them. It's a problem if you're building systems as a dilettante. There are enough individuals on the planet that people can specialize so we need not be at the mercy of systems built by people of average discernment. > If their art dies out, maybe nobody will know how bad all the pianos are. And then we'll all have slightly worse pianos than we would otherwise have. And I mean if that's the way things are going to go, then let's just steer the Earth into the Sun, because what's the point of any of this. One counterexample to this viewpoint is Damascus steel. The exact art of making it has been lost (although now effectively reproduced), but modern steels surpass the qualities that made Damascus steel prized. It turns out those ancient masters didn't know bad their steel was. Maybe modern piano tuners don't know how bad their technique is, once the process of "finessing how the overtones interact with each other" has been thoroughly characterized by present or future technology.

Loughla 2y ago
I thought that it was precisely because ancient masters knew how poor their steel was that Damascus even became a thing. Is that not correct? I have always read that it was a technique to overcome bad base metal.
- bluGill 2y ago
  Pretty much. We know how it was produced, but we have better steel available and so nobody is willing to go through that much work to produce an inferior product. If you want a good sword you start with good modern steel and treat it like the book says - which includes give it as little time in the furnace as you can get by while shaping it. If you want a sword that looks pretty you can cheat to apply decorations that look like Damascus from a distance and that is good enough (you might or might not start with good steel, but if you do it is better than a real Damascus sword). Nobody has the patience to do things the old way as there is no advantage to it. If the old way actually had advantages someone would do it. In the case of Damascus we have enough science to know it wasn't as good. There are other areas where people to go through the effort to create something the old way - either it isn't much more work (it may be more work, just not too much more), or the old way is somehow better.

huijzer 2y ago

Very true. My favorite example of this is academia. When you do a MSc everything seems nice and some things feel a bit weird but it is what it is. Then over time you realize how misaligned the incentives are with what is actually useful for the general population. But the whole system is writing with much jargon and emphasizing that they followed all procedures and peer-review. So the population thinks it must be useful, or at least cannot point out why it isn’t.

BiteCode_dev 2y ago

Remind me of the florida keys syndrom where each generation think it's a great fishing spot but doesn't have a frame of reference for how much the fishes actually became less numerous and smaller: https://earimediaprodweb.azurewebsites.net/Api/v1/Multimedia/4404375b-5eed-431b-adb2-a465ba433c57/Rendition/low-res/Content/Public https://earimediaprodweb.azurewebsites.net/Api/v1/Multimedia...

keiferski 2y ago
I get this feeling a lot when reading old books. People used to be…more interesting? Or at least there were more interesting places like Paris in the 20s. Today the “artistic” hubs in the world feel boring compared to NYC in the 80s or Paris circa 1890-1930, but you wouldn’t know it if you didn’t read the older books.
- renewiltord 2y ago
  That's just a property of the fact that the interesting people all know each other and the uninteresting people don't know them. In some sense, Sam Altman, Emmett Shear, Eliezer Yudkowsky, Paul Graham, Elon Musk, John Carmack are in a shared sphere. And they are interesting whether you think they are smart or not. You don't hear about John-Pierre Duvage from the coffee shop because he wasn't interesting. In the future, they will talk about the places where these people met. Groupies always wonder where the musicians are. The musicians find each other easily.
  - keiferski 2y ago
    Those people you mentioned are interesting and intelligent but I wouldn’t call them artistic, or diverse intellectually. And more importantly they aren’t “a scene”, in a physical place, like Paris or lower Manhattan were.
    - renewiltord 2y ago
      Their sphere almost certainly include the rest that those outside barely know of. For every well-known Aella in the group, there is someone more strange and esoteric with local influence only within. The strange and interesting are never as legible to their contemporaries as they are to those who come after because one's influence is only clear after one has sufficiently influenced. A thing that strikes me is that people in the Bay Area frequently claim that it has nothing interesting, but my friends hosted a 30-person event locally that had musical compositions, art, and talks about all sorts of things. A local festival. No one outside us knew. I suspect that, like us, there are numerous groups of people out there and that this sort of stuff is common. Only those with breakout ideas make it out, but the groups themselves comprise individuals who, if you teased out their tales, would make good stories. If my friend groups span libertarian billionaire techies and union working-class ironworkers, I must assume that the rest of these groups are similarly diverse. For my part, I have found the Bay Area a fascinating place full of fascinating people. I am thankful to have found my way here. Sometimes I think not even Moll Flanders has lived more exciting a life than many of those I have met here.

ChrisMarshallNY 2y ago

> If their art dies out, maybe nobody will know how bad all the pianos are. I'm already seeing this happening in a number of industries (including software development). It starts with the consumers accepting crap, and works its way back. That's why I think AI-produced output will be just fine, for most folks.

vundercind 2y ago
The vast majority of content that entertains people online is just the Nokia Snake Game but for writing or film. Near-zero-value time-wasters. Hard to make it much worse or ruin it when it’s already worth about as much as used tissue paper. That’s also why I don’t relate to concerns about what might happen to the Web without ad revenue—nearly all of what that pays for has nearly zero value and is easily replaced by plentiful other low-value things. (Yes, I do include this comment among the low-value junk)
- pimlottc 2y ago
  That’s an insult to Nokia Snake. Nokia Snake doesn’t have ads, loot boxes, in-app purchases, collectibles, social media integration or any of dozens of other dark pattern that are practically standard in casual games now.
  - vundercind 2y ago
    Oh, it’s not shittified, I just mean it’s a way to pass the time that’s basically interchangeable with tons and tons of other ways to pass the time. That’s most of what people do on the Web, and that’s what most of the content’s for. It’s all solitaire (the real card game) or reading the magazines in the doctor’s waiting room. Just something to do.
Suppafly 2y ago
>I'm already seeing this happening in a number of industries (including software development). It comes up in all sorts of unexpected places in technology, once things are overly optimized for price often the original better version goes away. Like right now you can't buy a good cassette tape player, because the only ones made now all use the same mechanism that sucks. They stopped making good mechanisms like 20 years ago when people mostly stopped buying cassettes.

yogurtboy 2y ago

A lot of people commenting are referring to hobbyist art, like TFA's piano tuning, or audio cables, or sewing equestrian tack. The point (that the article alludes to but definitely does not spell out) is that, with the advent of general AI, this style of artistry will die in EVERY field if we allow it to; not just art and media, but engineering, technology, policy too. This to me is a HUGE problem with the introduction of these consumer-ready AIs. You may be able to say "agh I'm an engineer and I wouldn't let this happen in my project!" but some places just want their dang power plants, whether or not they have a host of lifelong nuclear engineering in their region. I worry about a power plant that has a fault when the only true experts are few and far between.

Spivak 2y ago
What do you think makes AI special? Technology advances have been killing artisans in every field for as long as we've had them.
- beedeebeedee 2y ago
  These new AI tools have the potential to be more personally comprehensive and have more widespread adoption than slavery and other forms of servitude. The loss of skill (or lack of development) that the parent commenter is referring to has been discussed as widely as Hegel's master-slave dialectic to Idiocracy. Individuals and cultures that use these tools to replace the innate tools they have developed become qualitatively less sophisticated, unless they are pressured by some other external need, or their own self-mastery. I suspect we will have a mix of all these situations across fields and cultures that adopt these new AI tools, and will need to focus on not only making the tools better, but pressuring ourselves to be better (i.e., we replaced physical labor through previous tools, but have only partly accommodated that lack of physical development through gym culture, sports, and more back to the earth activities like hiking- personal transportation being one of the first things to get replaced by new tools like domesticated animals, bikes and cars). If it happens too fast, or we have other catastrophes, we might need to bring back non-military conscription focused on the environment (as in William James's lecture on the Moral Equivalent of War), in order to prop up our nation state and technological culture that it has provided the foundation for.

dsjoerg 2y ago

We don't know how different, and how good, things can be until we try. Until some of us invest in discernment, invest in the art of it, and the rest of us give it a listen or a look. Some cultures end up adopting the new level of discernment wholesale. And in some cultures, the refinement slowly slips away and things revert back to the sloppy, lazy, easier-to-sustain base level. As others have noted, our time and attention are finite. Both as producers and consumers of culture. I care about some things and ignore others, both as a producer and a consumer. We individually and collectively choose which aspects of life get the attention and the love. These are the aesthetics of life.

JackFr 2y ago

There is an alternate explanation. The piano is fine. The soloist is an asshole and likes to make people jump through hoops. The conductor does or doesn't realize this, but either way doesn't want to upset the soloist. The piano tuner knows the piano is fine but doesn't mind getting paid so plays along. The author plays along, unwilling to point out them emperor has no clothes.

skybrian 2y ago
The piano tuner didn’t need to explain what they were doing, though, and they’re not being paid any more to fake that.

mordae 2y ago

1. If we really need consistently good piano sound quality, maybe we should replace the unreliable pianos overly susceptible to humidity and wear with computer synthesizers that can be told exactly how to sound? I mean that leaves just the speaker housing and wear on the input interface. 2. Maybe music is actually a hobby and not really necessary to be produced reliably. Maybe the fun is in the negotiation with instruments and people? If the priority is a diverse, fun, culture, maybe don't structure all economy and politics around the idea forcing people to justify their existence.

wildermuthn 2y ago

Counterpoint — good-enough technology prevents over-optimization, where we pay too high of a cost for too-marginal gains. It is generally better to reduce the cost of a 98% solution than to maintain the cost of a 99% solution. There will be exceptions for domains that require a 100% solution, but piano tuning is not one of them.

aners_xyz 2y ago
In most cases piano tuners are probably operating within the confines of what’s realistic with regards to cost and time. I mean even in this post they did exactly that. Not sure the point you are making

Aardwolf 2y ago

> 'God's prank on musicians' (where He cruelly rigged the structure of reality such that (3/2)^n!=2^m for any integers n, m but IT'S SO CLOSE CMON MAN) What exactly is this about? Other than (3/2)^12 being 129.7 which is somewhat close to 2^7 I don't see much other being close. Also, musician's mathematics are so weird, talking about '11' while there are 12 notes, '5th' while no 5 is involved, ...

vaylian 2y ago
There seems to be something missing from the problem statement. If I can choose any integers n, m, then I will just choose n=m=0 which gives a trivial equation.
- 8note 2y ago
  That says the issue though. The only time you can tune a piano is when the frequency is 0 - that is, that there's no sound being played
  - recursive 2y ago
    Doesn't mean that. 2^0 is non-zero. I interpret it to mean that every note must have the same non-zero frequency. In other words, the ratio between any two notes is 2^0 = 1.
331c8c71 2y ago
3:2 is the perfect fifth. 2:1 is the octave. Hence if you climb (or descend) by perfect fifths you never align with the notes you get if you climb (descend) by octaves. Look up "just intonation" and "equal temperament" if you are interested. Also "The Well-Tempered Clavier" is highly recommended for listening!
- heikkilevanto 2y ago
  Just a side note: "The Well-Tempered Clavier" is not at all the same as the "Equally Tuned Piano". Bach was certainly aware of the equal tuning, where all intervals were the same. It had been used on lutes for some centuries. But with harpsichords, and to some extent pipe organs, an equal temperament was not what Bach or his contemporaries wanted - it didn't have a single pure interval!

renewiltord 2y ago

It's going to be okay. The wonder of the Internet is that you can create small communities found among the billions that inhabit the Earth. And your communities can create small areas of deep interest. The drive to make something a certain way is built into many of us as humans. It will not break in the face of some degree of standard quality. As an example of a triviality: Costco has pens to put your cart in. They also have people going around retrieving carts. They then have a tractor move the carts to where people can take them into the store. Many people leave their carts in the pens. Some do not. The other day, the carts were overflowing from the pen I'd walked to, but I could see the reason was that there were two carts misaligned deep in the pen. A valid and reasonable thing to do is to have gone to a different pen. Many would have accepted adding my cart to the overflow as well. But a desire for order caused me to realign the carts and solve the overflow. If I had not, nothing much would have gone wrong. Because I did, no greater result was created. I am paid a large sum of money and any marginal additional time I spend I can create more money (since I work in HFT). The cart wrangler is paid very little. It is not comparatively advantageous. The work was wasted work, in some sense. But I had to do it. I was compelled to do so. This is a useless thing, but there are people who feel that desire I felt there who will feel it for other things. To make a better-sounding piano, the perfect dish, to master joinery. And things will be good for them and those they serve. And that is good. And that is enough. Because total utility is the integral of utility across all. And less individual over more participants can sum to higher overall utility.

mattgreenrocks 2y ago

This is another instance of an insidious modern meme that states that people with non-mainstream skill X should be okay with it dying out because it's not mainstream. It's just a long-winded way to call something irrelevant without actually saying that. But we know we can't call it that, so we dress it up in pseudo-intellectual bullshit, citing "pragmatism" and using misdirection: "oh, but who can actually appreciate such an obscure thing?" It's exceedingly presumptuous on the speaker's part. The world's a big place, but it's only as big as we perceive it to be. Don't let people who need it to be smaller tell you what to think.

kazinator 2y ago

Hearing things the easy part. The finer you split the hair, the harder it is to actually translate that to a tuning action, with a piano. There are no fine-grained worm gears in the tuning pegs. The pegs are just metal sticks stuck into a hole, prevented from rotating (going flat) by static friction. You cannot adjust them smoothly; when you turn them with the tuning wrench (properly called a "tuning hammer"!) you must overcome static friction to make them move. At that point, they will jump. If you're looking to make a very fine adjustment, it will be almost certainly overshot. So you must do something like jump to a sharper pitch, and from there try to relax it by jumping down to the target pitch. (And that also results in better tuning stability: lower likelihood it will slip.) If the target is very narrowly defined, this can take multiple attempts. The piano has 88 keys, the bulk of which have three strings: have fun!

pas 2y ago
... but why? sure gears - like on guitars - would be probably too big and wouldn't fit[0], right? (and/or too expensive) but they could put the knobs on the top of the peg ... the gear could be inside, and as it is rotated it could push out small cams or "break pads" to make a wedge[1], same friction would make sure the pin stays in place and does not rotate, but no need for the hammering. of course probably because of acoustic this or that having solid pins is "much" better? [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Piano_tuning_lever_that_is_on_a_tuning_pin_with_hammer_striking_a_string_in_an_acoustic_grand_piano.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Piano_tuning_lever_that_i... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molly_(fastener) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molly_(fastener)

stcredzero 2y ago

If their art dies out, maybe nobody will know how bad all the pianos are. And then we'll all have slightly worse pianos than we would otherwise have. And I mean if that's the way things are going to go, then let's just steer the Earth into the Sun, because what's the point of any of this. I think a similar thing happened to journalism ethics over the course of the 20th century up through the 1st quarter of the 21st. The XKCD counterpoint: https://xkcd.com/915/ https://xkcd.com/915/ (I think this shows how arrogant Randall Munroe can be sometimes. He does a lot of great stuff, but when he's wrong, he's egregiously so!)

8note 2y ago
If you extend your journalism one back a quarter, you lose that trend, instead, we start and end with the fine art of creating click bait. Yellow journalists followed by Buzzfeed bloggers

patrickhogan1 2y ago

AI scales expert discernment

sirspacey 2y ago

We’ve already lost a tremendous amount of craft over the last 1,000 years. There are almost no craftspeople left in the world who can do the kind of moldings & designs you see in renaissance era buildings. Having been a classical musician, what I noticed about getting tuning right is there is a body sensation of lightness/breath that is palpable if you are a classical enthusiast - even if you can’t distinguish the sound you are hearing from an “ideal memory” of what it should sound like. But the largest reduction in auditory tech has already happened - mp3 compression. Uncompressed audio is radically different and richer than low fi digital compression, but almost everything we hear everywhere is coming through streaming services. The rare delights of extreme tech built around the first principles of a discipline like sound/music are achieved by overcoming very difficult and confounding problems. They are technical wonders as much as they are refined experiences. I once worked with a scientist who had permanently solved the issue of mic feedback. Imagine what revolution that would be for AV use cases everywhere! But it required a radical shift in the protocols used to build both mic and speakers, so even though Sony optioned it there’s not a single product you can buy with the tech. Like the Internet, everything is really just a semi-poor adaptation to a semi-poorly design system. Fundamental protocol changes (like ipv4 to ipv6) are brutally hard. We like to believe that modern society is hard-wired for improvement, but it seems mostly hard-wired for minimal change that delivers marginal improvements detectable by the lowest common denominator consumer/user. To me, that makes it all the more extraordinary when genuine protocol level changes - like EV cars - are made reality.

deleted 2y ago
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austin-cheney 2y ago
Just in renaissance? There is virtually nobody left in the workforce that can write JavaScript. Most of the old timers have gotten out, and the youngsters are an epic example of the article: the loss of perspective to self-reflect due to a machine (library) that does their jobs for them. Case in point: take React and querySelectors away and watch the sadness unfold like an apocalypse movie. Yes, yes, I know there are still people who can/do write JavaScript... they just are not statistically represented in the workforce.

akira2501 2y ago

> Your discernment in a subject often improves as you dedicate time and attention to that subject. The space of possible subjects is huge, so on average your discernment is terrible, relative to what it could be. This is a serious problem if you create a machine that does everyone's job for them. This is the "first level" of expertise. Yes, you will notice this as you delve into more and more areas, but you also find there are a lot of common modes and human patterns that inextricably become part of the subject matter. Having a grasp on this allows you to very quickly get to the intermediate level in most subjects. Consequently, this is why I dislike modern math's continued fascination with Greek symbols, when Greek or Latin is not taught anymore. It creates an artificial barrier to entry that's very frustrating.

auggierose 2y ago
I find German letters much more problematic. Greek symbols are very readable.
- akira2501 2y ago
  Admittedly.. these days it's much easier. In the 1990s and prior to unicode it was a small nightmare. It's the same issue that Wikipedia still generally uses generated images to display equations, so unless you know the name of the symbol or can type it, you're going to have a hard time finding any reference to it.
FrojoS 2y ago
I'm not sure I follow. What symbols should be used for variables? Once you run out of all characters in the Latin alphabet, you either use another one or you have to resort to subscripts, hyperscript etc.

steelframe 2y ago

Having grown up in the generation of DVDs and Blu-rays I'm cursed with the inability to ignore streaming video compression artifacts such as blocking, banding, and ringing. They alone can get me annoyed enough that it breaks my engagement with the film. Any sort of hiccup from packet loss resulting in complete distortion of the video or buffering sends me into a "fsck this sh!t" rage. It completely ruins the experience for me. That means I will never watch a film that I really care about via streaming. I don't have a lot of time to watch films these days, so when I do I always opt for a physical disc to make sure I actually enjoy the experience. In addition I've noticed that it often costs $20 to "rent" a new release via streaming and $30 to buy an actual disc, so it doesn't make any financial sense to me at all to "rent" a crap streaming experience for 2/3 of the cost of buying a high-quality copy of the film. But now there's another problem. I've noticed that many films being released today are streaming-only. One I looked at last week could be "rented" from a streaming service for $20, "bought" from said streaming service for $30, or bought on physical media in JULY 2025. That's right, an entire year from now. In years past I've frequently made it a habit to head down to the local Target in the late afternoon to see what new releases they have in the electronics department. However the last time I went there the Blu-ray section had been completely removed. No doubt because studios are no longer releasing new films on Blu-ray until a motherfscking YEAR after they make it available on streaming. When I asked an associate where the films were he apologetically stammered, "Uh, yeah, sorry, we're, uh, turning down our film section. There are a few stragglers left at the end of the aisle over there." Now there is no way for me to legally get a new release film that I can tolerate watching within a reasonable amount of time. I would garner that it's primarily an artifact (no pun intended) of the current generation having grown up with crap streaming videos, and so they are adapted to it and don't have expectations for quality like those of us from the DVD and Blu-ray generation have. I suppose this is another way it goes to show that knowing how bad most things are and precisely how they're bad is more a curse than a blessing. As I walked out of Target empty-handed I admit I did have a feeling somewhat like wanting the Earth to be steered into the sun. And then I jumped on VPN and pirated the film I wanted to watch.

dimatura 2y ago
For what it's worth, I recently visited a thrift store and I was somewhat surprised to see a sizable DVD/bluray section. I imagine there won't be any new releases there, though.

moi2388 2y ago

What an absolutely lovely little read that was

beryilma 2y ago

If Keith Jarrett can produce such a sublime music as his Köln Concert on a broken piano, perhaps the level of perfection mentioned in the article is just professional pedantry. After all, isn't an artist a better artist when they can use their medium to maximum effect no matter its imperfections. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_K%C3%B6ln_Concert https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_K%C3%B6ln_Concert

lalalandland 2y ago
I was thinking the same. Technical perfection and artistic perfection on a Venn diagram are two not entirely overlapping circles
- biztos 2y ago
  Two great examples from art are Michelangelo (look at the women) and Caravaggio (look carefully at anything).
defrost 2y ago
I came looking for this and should add that his broken piano concert is the number one global best selling piano album. How a total disaster became the world’s best-selling piano album https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wIXMkZAcgRo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wIXMkZAcgRo

micromacrofoot 2y ago

Sometimes precision dies, no one cares, and that's ok. There are vanishingly few people who can maintain pipe organs, which is ok because historically speaking relatively few people want to listen to pipe organs anymore. We can't prioritize everything all the time forever.

agnos 2y ago

This reminds me of the current research in ML of "simplifying" models for inference (pruning, distillation, etc.). Our model of reality is so imprecise, can we be confident that all the local details are insignificant to the global context?

semanticjudo 2y ago

Reminds me of the narcissism of small differences: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narcissism_of_small_differences https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narcissism_of_small_differen... Few people will care because only a few are capable of caring and the world keeps on turning.

exitzer0 2y ago

It only takes a single visit to an old house built around the turn of century to realize that the artistry, craftsmanship, and all of the other skills needed to make such a thing today are incredibly rare. Everyone seems to think and say that they want some for of AI to arrive and free us from all that grind that is beneath us. I am just reminded of this TNG episode. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mA9fcTJGXf0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mA9fcTJGXf0

Spellman 2y ago
This is classic Survivorship Bias

bena 2y ago

People like the piano tuner in question are the kinds of people I love talking to and watching work. They know these tiny minute details of things most of us only have a gross understanding of. They know the ins and outs of the craft they've chosen and have a true joy in working it.

leshow 2y ago

The book "Blood in the Machine: The Origins of the Rebellion Against Big Tech" covers lots of stories like this from the industrial revolution. The luddites resisted having their work taken over by machines. The machines produced worse quality, but were cheaper and lowered the skill level required to do the work. It also made output predictable, allowed people to be bunched into factories and enabled child labour and other kinds of exploitation. At the time people resisted having their autonomy taken away by smashing the machines and burning factories. It's a great book that will surprise you with how similar many of the situations we deal with today are. I know the post is about "discernment", but I think the author kind of missed the real issue. It's about automation making things shitty, so that society can be reshaped to maximize profit extraction. We _could_ live in a world that strikes a balance between the relentless drive to automate and a more humanistic approach, but that would require structural changes.

Slava_Propanei 2y ago

[dead]

cyanydeez 2y ago

Is the inverse much much more concerning. Like vaccines, we have very little idea just howngood it is to identify preventBle dieseases and reduce suffering

8bitsrule 2y ago

This article came along just as I'm finally digging into *Lost Technologies of Ancient Egypt." This article reminded me of more than one passage from Dunn ... I'll quote a couple here. [Dunn 'quoting' a sculpture:]"Don't just gape in awe and wonder, shake your head, and walk away. Bring me back to life! Know me -- who I was and what I was. The only way to do this is to understand what I am and build another! Why am I smiling? Don't think for a minute that I am content sitting here on my pedastal, misunderstood by the droves that have passed by for centuries. There is more here than meets the eye." Dunn now: "Words cannot describe my feelings of wonder and awe as I absorbed from the temples not only a philosophical and spiritual aspect but also with my engineer's brain. These temples impressed upon me indelibly that they were incredibly important from an engineering and scientific perspective. " It seems to me that nearly all of us are forced to walk through most of life in this way ... not because we're deliberatly ignorant ... because we can only truly see, and resonate with, that which is within the scope of our varied expertises (be they one or five). To all else we must remain largely blind, part of the misunderstanding droves ... unless someone with regard for the nuances comes along to let us inside long enough to catch -that glimpse-.

nullc 2y ago

We don't know how good most things are nor precisely how they're good

hoseja 2y ago

"why don't you use a fancy electronic tuner for this, and just have a table to look up the frequencies for each string, and tune it that way?" "..." There just aren't tuners fancy enough IMO. Make one with a high resolution spectrogram, I think the piano tuner person would actually appreciate that. So much subtle detail in a spectrogram. edit: there's a discussion below the essay on some just such very fancy tuners.