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> 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 d

> 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?).
    - thaumasiotes 2y ago
      That won't stop people from telling the story. Wine is the same way.
      - HappMacDonald 2y ago
        I disagree. In a blind test I can absolutely tell which application is running natively on Windows.
        thaumasiotes 2y ago
        Wine, the beverage.
        RandomThoughts3 2y ago
        I think you missed the joke. But to get back on topic I’m not sure I get how wine is the same. Wine is a product with large taste variations between the different regions and vine varieties. Plus depending of the year you will again have variations in the grapes which can be more or less balanced during the fabrication. Some producers are known to have produced particularly great wine some specific years which lead to say bottles being very expensive but most of it is very much fact based. The only dubious thing I see in wine is that the way aging changes the taste of a bottle is not an improvement indefinitely. At some point the wine just gets worst and the search for very old bottle is mostly posturing.
    - detourdog 2y ago
      That is sort of what I meant. The idea that ancient violins hold an unattainable mystique. That is now just an investment vehicle. I violated HN guidelines by being too flippant in my answer.
    - bluGill 2y ago
      Which Stradivarius? He made many, some better than others. Also, which modern violin - there are many makers who make theirs sound different, and of course each violin from the same maker will have their own sound.
  - fuzzfactor 2y ago
    Deeply check out the story of Steinway if you respect their instruments. It's not publicized but there was a documentary about how they almost lost far too much of their raw abilities gained since the 19th century when it comes to institutional knowledge which had always been essential to the way they had made pianos in a less-then-fully documented way, that had been passed on through generations. Most likely some of the most talented builders at earlier times were not very literate with paperwork anyway. The modern company dropped the ball for quite a while through attrition, until an urgent effort was undertaken to preserve what they had and uncover any little tidbits that were inadvertently lost. A lot of careful measurements were taken like never before, and documentation produced. I doubt if the pianos are the same, but don't think I would be able to tell the difference either. This page has some excellent little videos itself: https://www.steinway.com/news/features/inside-the-new-york-city-factory https://www.steinway.com/news/features/inside-the-new-york-c...
    - detourdog 2y ago
      I think there is a Jean shepherd story about his apprenticeship spent in a harp or piano factory. I think the arc is he started out lost and hating it, finally started to like it and then they chose to keep the other kid they hired. So he was left unsure how he felt.
- ants_everywhere 2y ago
  > The “best” had to be discovered and learned, and can be learned again in the future Only if the conditions required for re-discovery occur in the future. Those conditions may include things like a thriving world market in high-performance acoustic pianos, the need to have only the best pianos played at court, the need for one king to be or appear wealthier than another king etc. Acoustic pianos may never be that important to humanity again, so it's not clear we'll recover all information we gained when they were. Archeologists often try to reconstruct ancient practices. Although modern humans have the advantage of a much larger basis of knowledge, it's not always trivial nor even always possible to reconstruct old ideas. Learning is a feedback loop process. Whether you can recover knowledge depends on how successfully you can replicate the feedback loop. And that depends on ambient factors.
- tw04 2y ago
  > and can be learned again in the future Maybe? You’re assuming that someone between now and whenever humanity ends will have the time and resources to rediscover it. I’m not sure I’d take that bet.
- zo1 2y ago
  > "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." If the Boeing Effect is anything to go by, I don't think that assumption can hold in the short/medium term. Yes, maybe a century from now we'd have some set of pressures and alignment of various incentives such that we rebuild/rediscover this lost knowledge. But it'll be bleak until then, and we can't rely on it to happen in our generation. But I'd go further and argue it's deeper. Sometimes it's not just about any one single "node" being lost. The network of nodes and the unique connections and weights between them will forever be gone. To borrow yet another saying/aphorism. "It's much easier to destroy something than to build it."
WesolyKubeczek 2y ago
> 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. We sure as hell are cooked, son, we just ain't stopped movin' yet.
bigallen 2y ago
"maybe nobody will know how bad all the pianos are. And then we'll all have slightly worse pianos than we would otherwise have." But not really. Because if I truly cannot tell the difference between two objects or the way they sound, then they're the same to me, and I don't lose anything by listening to one over the other. If I could tell the difference, and it was important to me, then maybe I could do something about it. "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." This is exactly correct
- bluGill 2y ago
  But can you tell? I cannot tell many of these when I hear them in the piano tuning context (I've tried and given up). But I can hear how much better the piano sounds after all that is done. Then again, pianos are a bad compromise. There is no way to have octaves and fifths on the same piano, much less thirds (both major and minor). We learn to live with it, but it isn't right, for simple pieces you can tune a piano for that exact song and make it sound much better - but if you get much more complex than "mary had a little lamb" you run into a conflict and some key will need to be two different notes.
  - Miraste 2y ago
    The compromise in question is called equal temperament, and it's quite interesting if anyone is curious.
    - InitialLastName 2y ago
      In the case of stringed instruments, equal temperament isn't the only compromise; there is also stretched tuning, which seeks to match the harmonics (rather than the fundamentals) of harmonically related strings to one another (in a mechanical system where the harmonics are neither perfect integer ratios of the fundamental nor constant ratios across all of the strings).
myth_drannon 2y ago
And even on things that impact us, we can't be experts. The roofers did a shit job, but it looked so professionally done and I paid them well. Six months later the roof started to leak, by that time they were gone... The contractors widened the doorway but didn't bother checking the house plan and the load was incorrect, the structural engineer had a heart attack looking at that.
sorokod 2y ago
If all mathematians die we may get stuck with ℚ. That doesn't mean that irrationals don't exist or aren't worth exploring.
Log_out_ 2y ago
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.willeypianotuning.toneanalyzer&hl=en https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.willeypian...
bee_rider 2y ago
I’m not 100% sure but I read that part as a little bit of a joke? Like in the context of the story, the author had just describe the fact that the piano sounded only a little better, they thought, during the concert. Possibly the difference was imperceptible to most of the crowd. So I think chucking the Earth into the sun is intentionally being over-dramatic. Actually I think ending it on a joke was not the best move, because it does muddle things a bit. The stakes are not so high but it does matter. The piano was not bad enough for the audience to notice, but it was bad enough for the player to notice. If it is bad enough to bother the person using it, it is bad enough to matter. I mean, if the player is self-criticizing like most elite people do, they probably play better if they know everything, even the little stuff that the audience barely notices, is going right.
- HappMacDonald 2y ago
  > The piano was not bad enough for the audience to notice, but it was bad enough for the player to notice. It truly is a poor craftsman who blames the tool.
  - bee_rider 2y ago
    Sure. But, when self-criticizing, the good craftsman understands that their tools are their responsibility, the customer cares about the results.
  - bluGill 2y ago
    That is a reflection on the types of tool a good craftsman uses. While a good craftsman can use some bad tools to good results, they almost always use good tools (not using good tools is often done to prove a point).
wizardforhire 2y ago
I think this is the rub with anything subjective ie culture, especially art. Case in point greek sculptures from antiquity. We have known now for a while that they were painted and even know what pigments were used and can go on to create some semblance of what they probably looked like. But I have yet to come across anyone that prefers them to the unpainted versions. [1] More recently and more zeitgeist, Breakdancing in the olympics. Most people have no idea about breakdancing yet alone how its culture has evolved. Viewed from their lens Australia was a terrible joke easily made fun of, yet to the breaking community Rachael Gunn is a hero and being defended. [2] [1] https://youtube.com/watch?v=7UsYHo5iarM&pp=ygUVR3JlZWsgc3RhdHVlcyBwYWludGVk https://youtube.com/watch?v=7UsYHo5iarM&pp=ygUVR3JlZWsgc3Rhd... [2] https://youtube.com/watch?v=xPysiKi8mSM https://youtube.com/watch?v=xPysiKi8mSM
- yunwal 2y ago
  2 is disingenuous IMO. The olympics is an athletic competition. There are objective winners and losers. Breaking as an olympic sport is an athletic competition. It's a totally different thing than breaking as creative expression. There's nothing wrong with being confidently goofy at a party, sure, but if breaking wants to remain a method of expression and nothing else, it shouldn't be in the olympics. Otherwise it's fair to be puzzled (and amused) that a subpar athlete reached that level of competition.
roughly 2y ago
> 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. There's 8 billion of us. There's more than enough human attention to go around.
- ruined 2y ago
  There could be, but most individuals don't have the agency to freely allocate attention.
  - roughly 2y ago
    In the words of Stephen Jay Gould, “I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.”
- DiggyJohnson 2y ago
  That's not as much attention as to cover everything we can direct our attention at. This is so obvious to me that it almost seems like a tautology. More so, there being enough attention to go around is tangential to whether the sum of our attention colors in all the space.
jollyllama 2y ago
>yet life is just fine Based on what? You'd have to have somebody who could compare the past to the current state to establish a delta (or lack of one) and make that assertion.
- mistermann 2y ago
  > Based on what? Consciousness, downgraded due to cultural conditioning. For example: sometimes climate change is a huge deal, other times it is just fine. Consciousness (2024) seems unable to (try to) be consistent, it's like it lacks an index or logic processor or something. Maybe there's a startup idea here somehow.
  - undersuit 2y ago
    What if when climate change isn't a big deal you have the equivalent of a person using a free app with ads to tune your piano reporting to you, and when climate change is a big deal you have that piano repairman that can hit a key and tell you the string is rusted when struck too hard from experience.
    - mistermann 2y ago
      And what if it is the same person in both instances? Perhaps we will find out if Mother Nature shares your sense of humour.
      - undersuit 2y ago
        It's not the same person. Mother nature isn't a humorous process, it's physics.
        mistermann 2y ago
        What if the same Human thinks climate change is serious sometimes, but other times not, depending on the topic? Is this impossible? Also: it is not possible to know if everything is solely physics based. Faith comes in many forms, and scientism is one of them.
f154hfds 2y ago
You're under representing the sadness of lost artistry. For example, there is a marked degradation in the quality of fine art between the late classical period and the early medieval period. Civilization in a large region of Europe lost skills for centuries. We as a society don't want to lose artistry that was painstakingly developed - there's no guarantee it will ever be developed to that level of sophistication again. I don't want future generations to look at my generation as we do the dark ages. I think it's easy right now to think that progress is guaranteed or the opposite - that it's impossible to achieve. As population levels out civilization will need to become more about archiving what we know than pushing the envelope but no one wants to lose information.
bambax 2y ago
> X already has been happening and yet life is just fine The OP doesn't say life isn't fine. He says that if we don't aim for perfection, if art ceases to matter because we cease to truly care, then there's no point. We'll eat shit and reproduce just the same -- but there is no point. He's got a point.
- throwthrowuknow 2y ago
  Not really, he isn’t accounting for variation in skill level in his anecdote. If this piano tuner is just average for his profession, which seems likely, then the piano is still out of tune to the top 20% of discerning musicians, aficionados and expert piano tuners. The problem is there’s only a very small amount of that skill to go around so the majority of concert hall pianos are going to stay imperfectly tuned. The bigger problem is with the author’s assertion that a robotic piano tuner must necessarily be worse than a human. Maybe the currently available electronic tuners are but that they remain so isn’t a given, it’s more likely that they could be better but it would simply cost too much to achieve that level of performance at the moment. With sufficiently cheap electronics and intelligence it may eventually be possible to sell an automatic piano tuner to every piano owner that far exceeds any human’s ability. Is that not a valid way to achieve perfection?
  - bluGill 2y ago
    > the majority of concert hall pianos are going to stay imperfectly tuned. Any "important" concert hall will tune the piano before each concert. If there is no concert for months the piano will sit untuned (but still be practiced on), but a piano tuner is cheap insurance that nothing happened. If there are two concerts on the same day they might or might not tune between them. Of course there are a lot of "small-town" concert halls where the piano is not tuned as often. Your local high school probably isn't tuning the piano before the concert - even though the piano is moved from the choir room to the stage before the concert which is the most likely way to mess up tuning.
    - medstrom 2y ago
      They said the piano will be imperfectly tuned even when it was tuned just now, if the job was done by an average-skilled tuner.
jakubmazanec 2y ago
I think it's simpler than that - it's just repetition and practice. Even if we lose a skill, we can learn it again. And IMO very quickly - if the author of the article practiced tuning pianos for a few hundred hours, he would quickly discover how is his skill increasing.
- bluGill 2y ago
  Also is it worth it. We know longer know how to make a saturn-V rocket like what took us to the moon. We could figure it out, but we have much better technology and so if you want a rocket like that it is better to start from scratch at this point. (it probably would be cheaper as well once you adjust for inflation, but for sure better. Faster depends on your budget, NASA paid a lot of speed in the saturn-V program)
kazinator 2y ago
Maybe I don't want parallel minor 7th intervals on the piano to exhibit gradually changing beats among the harmonics, in proportion to the frequency. Maybe pianos don't need to be same to that extent.
- bluGill 2y ago
  Pianos should not have that - a piano should have a minor 7th that doesn't beat at all. However if you play the key tuned as a perfect minor 7th and use it as the root note for a standard major chord (root-third-fifth) it will sound terrible as the intervals will not even be close. Your choice is have hundreds of keys on the piano so that when you want the chord you select the exact perfect pitch you want (called just intonation), or we have to compromise the tuning of the piano somehow so we can get by with just 88 keys. We have chosen to stick with 88 keys and then use equal-temperment as a compromise so that the key we use for a minor 7th also sounds okay when used as the root note in a regular major chord. The piano overall sounds much worse than perfect, but it is an acceptable compromise. there are other compromises that people sometimes argue are better, whole books have been written on the subject.
  - kazinator 2y ago
    I don't think that's what the article is talking about: differences between perfect minor 7ths and equal-temperament ones. Rather, the tuner in question basically has already nailed the equal-temperament minor sevenths already (as far as you or I might think) and is just listening for beats among their harmonics now, so that when a run of parallel minor sevenths is played, the frequency of the beats among the harmonics rises in proportion to the frequency of the chord, like speeding up a recording.
maxerickson 2y ago
There's anyway, at the moment, more people that are more discerning. Maybe not for tuning your cheap upright piano, but it's pretty likely there's more concert halls with more amazing grand pianos than there ever was before.
drewhk 2y ago
It is not so clear-cut though. There is a hierarchy here that the article misses a bit I think. There will be participants of various awareness level: 1. Members of the audience that do not notice anything at all 2. Members of the audience that only notice it subconsciously, affecting some overall feeling of quality (an analogy would be typography which operates mostly in this realm) 3. Members of the audience that consciously notice that something is off, somewhere 4. The conductor that exactly knows that the piano is off 5. The tuner that exactly knows what and where is wrong with the piano
okr 2y ago
Love the last paragraph. Well described.
015a 2y ago
> "If X happens then we'll all be cooked!" I don't feel that statement is stating that if X happens we're screwed; its stating that if X happens why is life worth living? Its only one metric among many, but rates of depression and anxiety diagnosis are at an all time high.

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?).
  - thaumasiotes 2y ago
    That won't stop people from telling the story. Wine is the same way.
    - HappMacDonald 2y ago
      I disagree. In a blind test I can absolutely tell which application is running natively on Windows.
      - thaumasiotes 2y ago
        Wine, the beverage.
        RandomThoughts3 2y ago
        I think you missed the joke. But to get back on topic I’m not sure I get how wine is the same. Wine is a product with large taste variations between the different regions and vine varieties. Plus depending of the year you will again have variations in the grapes which can be more or less balanced during the fabrication. Some producers are known to have produced particularly great wine some specific years which lead to say bottles being very expensive but most of it is very much fact based. The only dubious thing I see in wine is that the way aging changes the taste of a bottle is not an improvement indefinitely. At some point the wine just gets worst and the search for very old bottle is mostly posturing.
  - detourdog 2y ago
    That is sort of what I meant. The idea that ancient violins hold an unattainable mystique. That is now just an investment vehicle. I violated HN guidelines by being too flippant in my answer.
  - bluGill 2y ago
    Which Stradivarius? He made many, some better than others. Also, which modern violin - there are many makers who make theirs sound different, and of course each violin from the same maker will have their own sound.
- fuzzfactor 2y ago
  Deeply check out the story of Steinway if you respect their instruments. It's not publicized but there was a documentary about how they almost lost far too much of their raw abilities gained since the 19th century when it comes to institutional knowledge which had always been essential to the way they had made pianos in a less-then-fully documented way, that had been passed on through generations. Most likely some of the most talented builders at earlier times were not very literate with paperwork anyway. The modern company dropped the ball for quite a while through attrition, until an urgent effort was undertaken to preserve what they had and uncover any little tidbits that were inadvertently lost. A lot of careful measurements were taken like never before, and documentation produced. I doubt if the pianos are the same, but don't think I would be able to tell the difference either. This page has some excellent little videos itself: https://www.steinway.com/news/features/inside-the-new-york-city-factory https://www.steinway.com/news/features/inside-the-new-york-c...
  - detourdog 2y ago
    I think there is a Jean shepherd story about his apprenticeship spent in a harp or piano factory. I think the arc is he started out lost and hating it, finally started to like it and then they chose to keep the other kid they hired. So he was left unsure how he felt.
ants_everywhere 2y ago
> The “best” had to be discovered and learned, and can be learned again in the future Only if the conditions required for re-discovery occur in the future. Those conditions may include things like a thriving world market in high-performance acoustic pianos, the need to have only the best pianos played at court, the need for one king to be or appear wealthier than another king etc. Acoustic pianos may never be that important to humanity again, so it's not clear we'll recover all information we gained when they were. Archeologists often try to reconstruct ancient practices. Although modern humans have the advantage of a much larger basis of knowledge, it's not always trivial nor even always possible to reconstruct old ideas. Learning is a feedback loop process. Whether you can recover knowledge depends on how successfully you can replicate the feedback loop. And that depends on ambient factors.
tw04 2y ago
> and can be learned again in the future Maybe? You’re assuming that someone between now and whenever humanity ends will have the time and resources to rediscover it. I’m not sure I’d take that bet.
zo1 2y ago
> "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." If the Boeing Effect is anything to go by, I don't think that assumption can hold in the short/medium term. Yes, maybe a century from now we'd have some set of pressures and alignment of various incentives such that we rebuild/rediscover this lost knowledge. But it'll be bleak until then, and we can't rely on it to happen in our generation. But I'd go further and argue it's deeper. Sometimes it's not just about any one single "node" being lost. The network of nodes and the unique connections and weights between them will forever be gone. To borrow yet another saying/aphorism. "It's much easier to destroy something than to build it."

WesolyKubeczek 2y ago

> 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. We sure as hell are cooked, son, we just ain't stopped movin' yet.

bigallen 2y ago

"maybe nobody will know how bad all the pianos are. And then we'll all have slightly worse pianos than we would otherwise have." But not really. Because if I truly cannot tell the difference between two objects or the way they sound, then they're the same to me, and I don't lose anything by listening to one over the other. If I could tell the difference, and it was important to me, then maybe I could do something about it. "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." This is exactly correct

bluGill 2y ago
But can you tell? I cannot tell many of these when I hear them in the piano tuning context (I've tried and given up). But I can hear how much better the piano sounds after all that is done. Then again, pianos are a bad compromise. There is no way to have octaves and fifths on the same piano, much less thirds (both major and minor). We learn to live with it, but it isn't right, for simple pieces you can tune a piano for that exact song and make it sound much better - but if you get much more complex than "mary had a little lamb" you run into a conflict and some key will need to be two different notes.
- Miraste 2y ago
  The compromise in question is called equal temperament, and it's quite interesting if anyone is curious.
  - InitialLastName 2y ago
    In the case of stringed instruments, equal temperament isn't the only compromise; there is also stretched tuning, which seeks to match the harmonics (rather than the fundamentals) of harmonically related strings to one another (in a mechanical system where the harmonics are neither perfect integer ratios of the fundamental nor constant ratios across all of the strings).

myth_drannon 2y ago

And even on things that impact us, we can't be experts. The roofers did a shit job, but it looked so professionally done and I paid them well. Six months later the roof started to leak, by that time they were gone... The contractors widened the doorway but didn't bother checking the house plan and the load was incorrect, the structural engineer had a heart attack looking at that.

sorokod 2y ago

If all mathematians die we may get stuck with ℚ. That doesn't mean that irrationals don't exist or aren't worth exploring.

Log_out_ 2y ago

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.willeypianotuning.toneanalyzer&hl=en https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.willeypian...

bee_rider 2y ago

I’m not 100% sure but I read that part as a little bit of a joke? Like in the context of the story, the author had just describe the fact that the piano sounded only a little better, they thought, during the concert. Possibly the difference was imperceptible to most of the crowd. So I think chucking the Earth into the sun is intentionally being over-dramatic. Actually I think ending it on a joke was not the best move, because it does muddle things a bit. The stakes are not so high but it does matter. The piano was not bad enough for the audience to notice, but it was bad enough for the player to notice. If it is bad enough to bother the person using it, it is bad enough to matter. I mean, if the player is self-criticizing like most elite people do, they probably play better if they know everything, even the little stuff that the audience barely notices, is going right.

HappMacDonald 2y ago
> The piano was not bad enough for the audience to notice, but it was bad enough for the player to notice. It truly is a poor craftsman who blames the tool.
- bee_rider 2y ago
  Sure. But, when self-criticizing, the good craftsman understands that their tools are their responsibility, the customer cares about the results.
- bluGill 2y ago
  That is a reflection on the types of tool a good craftsman uses. While a good craftsman can use some bad tools to good results, they almost always use good tools (not using good tools is often done to prove a point).

wizardforhire 2y ago

I think this is the rub with anything subjective ie culture, especially art. Case in point greek sculptures from antiquity. We have known now for a while that they were painted and even know what pigments were used and can go on to create some semblance of what they probably looked like. But I have yet to come across anyone that prefers them to the unpainted versions. [1] More recently and more zeitgeist, Breakdancing in the olympics. Most people have no idea about breakdancing yet alone how its culture has evolved. Viewed from their lens Australia was a terrible joke easily made fun of, yet to the breaking community Rachael Gunn is a hero and being defended. [2] [1] https://youtube.com/watch?v=7UsYHo5iarM&pp=ygUVR3JlZWsgc3RhdHVlcyBwYWludGVk https://youtube.com/watch?v=7UsYHo5iarM&pp=ygUVR3JlZWsgc3Rhd... [2] https://youtube.com/watch?v=xPysiKi8mSM https://youtube.com/watch?v=xPysiKi8mSM

yunwal 2y ago
2 is disingenuous IMO. The olympics is an athletic competition. There are objective winners and losers. Breaking as an olympic sport is an athletic competition. It's a totally different thing than breaking as creative expression. There's nothing wrong with being confidently goofy at a party, sure, but if breaking wants to remain a method of expression and nothing else, it shouldn't be in the olympics. Otherwise it's fair to be puzzled (and amused) that a subpar athlete reached that level of competition.

roughly 2y ago

> 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. There's 8 billion of us. There's more than enough human attention to go around.

ruined 2y ago
There could be, but most individuals don't have the agency to freely allocate attention.
- roughly 2y ago
  In the words of Stephen Jay Gould, “I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.”
DiggyJohnson 2y ago
That's not as much attention as to cover everything we can direct our attention at. This is so obvious to me that it almost seems like a tautology. More so, there being enough attention to go around is tangential to whether the sum of our attention colors in all the space.

jollyllama 2y ago

>yet life is just fine Based on what? You'd have to have somebody who could compare the past to the current state to establish a delta (or lack of one) and make that assertion.

mistermann 2y ago
> Based on what? Consciousness, downgraded due to cultural conditioning. For example: sometimes climate change is a huge deal, other times it is just fine. Consciousness (2024) seems unable to (try to) be consistent, it's like it lacks an index or logic processor or something. Maybe there's a startup idea here somehow.
- undersuit 2y ago
  What if when climate change isn't a big deal you have the equivalent of a person using a free app with ads to tune your piano reporting to you, and when climate change is a big deal you have that piano repairman that can hit a key and tell you the string is rusted when struck too hard from experience.
  - mistermann 2y ago
    And what if it is the same person in both instances? Perhaps we will find out if Mother Nature shares your sense of humour.
    - undersuit 2y ago
      It's not the same person. Mother nature isn't a humorous process, it's physics.
      - mistermann 2y ago
        What if the same Human thinks climate change is serious sometimes, but other times not, depending on the topic? Is this impossible? Also: it is not possible to know if everything is solely physics based. Faith comes in many forms, and scientism is one of them.

f154hfds 2y ago

You're under representing the sadness of lost artistry. For example, there is a marked degradation in the quality of fine art between the late classical period and the early medieval period. Civilization in a large region of Europe lost skills for centuries. We as a society don't want to lose artistry that was painstakingly developed - there's no guarantee it will ever be developed to that level of sophistication again. I don't want future generations to look at my generation as we do the dark ages. I think it's easy right now to think that progress is guaranteed or the opposite - that it's impossible to achieve. As population levels out civilization will need to become more about archiving what we know than pushing the envelope but no one wants to lose information.

bambax 2y ago

> X already has been happening and yet life is just fine The OP doesn't say life isn't fine. He says that if we don't aim for perfection, if art ceases to matter because we cease to truly care, then there's no point. We'll eat shit and reproduce just the same -- but there is no point. He's got a point.

throwthrowuknow 2y ago
Not really, he isn’t accounting for variation in skill level in his anecdote. If this piano tuner is just average for his profession, which seems likely, then the piano is still out of tune to the top 20% of discerning musicians, aficionados and expert piano tuners. The problem is there’s only a very small amount of that skill to go around so the majority of concert hall pianos are going to stay imperfectly tuned. The bigger problem is with the author’s assertion that a robotic piano tuner must necessarily be worse than a human. Maybe the currently available electronic tuners are but that they remain so isn’t a given, it’s more likely that they could be better but it would simply cost too much to achieve that level of performance at the moment. With sufficiently cheap electronics and intelligence it may eventually be possible to sell an automatic piano tuner to every piano owner that far exceeds any human’s ability. Is that not a valid way to achieve perfection?
- bluGill 2y ago
  > the majority of concert hall pianos are going to stay imperfectly tuned. Any "important" concert hall will tune the piano before each concert. If there is no concert for months the piano will sit untuned (but still be practiced on), but a piano tuner is cheap insurance that nothing happened. If there are two concerts on the same day they might or might not tune between them. Of course there are a lot of "small-town" concert halls where the piano is not tuned as often. Your local high school probably isn't tuning the piano before the concert - even though the piano is moved from the choir room to the stage before the concert which is the most likely way to mess up tuning.
  - medstrom 2y ago
    They said the piano will be imperfectly tuned even when it was tuned just now, if the job was done by an average-skilled tuner.

jakubmazanec 2y ago

I think it's simpler than that - it's just repetition and practice. Even if we lose a skill, we can learn it again. And IMO very quickly - if the author of the article practiced tuning pianos for a few hundred hours, he would quickly discover how is his skill increasing.

bluGill 2y ago
Also is it worth it. We know longer know how to make a saturn-V rocket like what took us to the moon. We could figure it out, but we have much better technology and so if you want a rocket like that it is better to start from scratch at this point. (it probably would be cheaper as well once you adjust for inflation, but for sure better. Faster depends on your budget, NASA paid a lot of speed in the saturn-V program)

kazinator 2y ago

Maybe I don't want parallel minor 7th intervals on the piano to exhibit gradually changing beats among the harmonics, in proportion to the frequency. Maybe pianos don't need to be same to that extent.

bluGill 2y ago
Pianos should not have that - a piano should have a minor 7th that doesn't beat at all. However if you play the key tuned as a perfect minor 7th and use it as the root note for a standard major chord (root-third-fifth) it will sound terrible as the intervals will not even be close. Your choice is have hundreds of keys on the piano so that when you want the chord you select the exact perfect pitch you want (called just intonation), or we have to compromise the tuning of the piano somehow so we can get by with just 88 keys. We have chosen to stick with 88 keys and then use equal-temperment as a compromise so that the key we use for a minor 7th also sounds okay when used as the root note in a regular major chord. The piano overall sounds much worse than perfect, but it is an acceptable compromise. there are other compromises that people sometimes argue are better, whole books have been written on the subject.
- kazinator 2y ago
  I don't think that's what the article is talking about: differences between perfect minor 7ths and equal-temperament ones. Rather, the tuner in question basically has already nailed the equal-temperament minor sevenths already (as far as you or I might think) and is just listening for beats among their harmonics now, so that when a run of parallel minor sevenths is played, the frequency of the beats among the harmonics rises in proportion to the frequency of the chord, like speeding up a recording.

maxerickson 2y ago

There's anyway, at the moment, more people that are more discerning. Maybe not for tuning your cheap upright piano, but it's pretty likely there's more concert halls with more amazing grand pianos than there ever was before.

drewhk 2y ago

It is not so clear-cut though. There is a hierarchy here that the article misses a bit I think. There will be participants of various awareness level: 1. Members of the audience that do not notice anything at all 2. Members of the audience that only notice it subconsciously, affecting some overall feeling of quality (an analogy would be typography which operates mostly in this realm) 3. Members of the audience that consciously notice that something is off, somewhere 4. The conductor that exactly knows that the piano is off 5. The tuner that exactly knows what and where is wrong with the piano

okr 2y ago

Love the last paragraph. Well described.

015a 2y ago

> "If X happens then we'll all be cooked!" I don't feel that statement is stating that if X happens we're screwed; its stating that if X happens why is life worth living? Its only one metric among many, but rates of depression and anxiety diagnosis are at an all time high.