7 ms·

"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 t

"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).
    - adgjlsfhk1 2y ago
      and wind instruments can and do bend their notes with their mouths to fit better in the chord than equal temperament
- epicide 2y ago
  > 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 "Better" is always relative, so it's often more correct to say it is/sounds "different". For example, a true temperament guitar can sound weird/"wrong" to some people. A lot of folks are used to those compromises just being part of the sound. Similar to a "honky tonk" piano: if you tuned it differently, it would come across as a timbre change more than simply "better" tuning. In the grand scheme of things, there are professions and arts that were once considered essential to everyday life and in ways that we today don't even consider. The profession is lost to time, but so is the need. It's the in-between transitional state, where the profession is in the process of dying, that is the most painful period. Some day, the last note played on a piano will be played and lament for the piano tuner will die with it.
  - card_zero 2y ago
    I don't know, I guess everything ends eventually, but people still play the crumhorn, the carnyx, and the eunuch flute.
Miraste 2y ago
The internet has worsened this phenomenon. I, like many other people, have gotten into the habit of appending site:reddit.com to Google searches as search quality declines. This gives better results from actual humans (usually), but it also skews toward people who are invested enough in the topic to post about it on niche subreddits. This leads to, for example, product recommendations that are way out of alignment with what most people need, even if the information about them is true.
- MrLeap 2y ago
  "product recommendations that are way out of alignment with what most people need" I have to disagree. When i dont do the reddit thing, the average quality of material products has been.. very bad. Amazon reviews don't seem to be enough to choose anything with an electric motor or a hinge that won't fall apart in a month of light use.
  - Miraste 2y ago
    Let me give an example: soundbars for TVs. Reddit will tell you to never buy one, because a dedicated speaker system sounds better at the same price. This is true-ish. However, a speaker system requires a large, heavy A/V unit, lots of wires, lots of space, and highly noticeable, if not outright ugly, speakers. A soundbar doesn't have any of those problems, is usually the cheaper option, and still sounds much better than built-in speakers. They're the right choice for most people, but it takes reading between the lines to parse that from reddit posts.
    - MrLeap 2y ago
      I trust people to be able to generally decide if they have the space, tolerance for cords and aesthetics to make a purchase decision like that. I'm struggling to visualize the peril in accidentally buying speakers. Personally, I'll happily pay for something with some features I don't need if it's got good build quality. Finding versions of MANY THINGS that aren't egregiously poorly made seems like it's getting harder? Maybe this is just the temporal warp of getting older. As subjective time passes by more quickly, entropy is getting more of my attention than when I was younger and a day felt long. It's possible my perception that tools are engineered to the brink of functioning by a thread is survivorship bias. All the old tools that are still trucking are just the ones that survived. No way to know for sure, but if some convincingly thrice burned carpenter on reddit makes me think I oughta buy mikita I probably will.
pclmulqdq 2y ago
> 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. Trust me, as a former piano/harpsichord tuner, that the audience absolutely can tell the difference between a perfectly tuned instrument and one that is badly tuned. They just can't put their finger on what that difference is. It's the same as when the viola section of an orchestra is out of tune or the horns drag (both very common problems for amateur symphonies). The overall effect is "muddier" and less "brilliant" than other performances, and you can tell as a listener, but very few people in the audience can say "the violas were flat in the adagio section."
- AnthonyMouse 2y ago
  It's worse than that. In many cases the consumer can't tell, but it still matters. Take food, for example. If the tomato on your sandwich has fewer micronutrients than a different one, you may not be able to taste it, especially after the restaurant (or you) have slathered the sandwich with sauces full of salt and sugar and fat. So you want a chef you can trust who knows how to choose a tomato (and a farmer who knows how to grow one), whether you can taste the difference or not, or the result at scale is you end up deficient in various vitamins and minerals and can't figure out why you're tired all the time.
  - pixl97 2y ago
    Another analogy would be a tomato grown in contaminated soil may taste the same, you just pay for it in cancer 20 years later.
    - AnthonyMouse 2y ago
      That's not quite the same thing, because if the tomato is full of cadmium, whether or not you can taste it the 0.01% of the customers who are chemists and personally test all of their food for safety themselves are going to figure it out. Then every store will refuse shipment of any of those tomatoes and the cops will come to shoot the farmer's dog and run over the tomato field with their ludicrous panzer. Whereas if they find that the tomato has 10% as much β-carotene as a tomato should or what have you, somebody will write an article about it that six in a thousand customers read and people will keep buying those tomatoes because they're cheaper and not even required to be labeled differently. It's the difference between "so bad that people won't stand for it" and "worse, but people tolerate it", and the second one can be more of a problem specifically because people don't get mad enough about it to fix it.
mlyle 2y ago
There's stuff on the edge, though-- like there was a post here a few days ago, where the commenter was talking about deploying monitoring and measurement into workplaces and finding lots of stuff wrong, and everyone panicking. On the one hand, panicking is unproductive: nothing is worse than it was last week. On the other hand, finding out that a whole lot of infrastructure that was supposed to make your business better, actually isn't doing its job, is still significant. If your e-mail campaigns weren't clickable, and you lost a bunch of business but never noticed, you still lost a bunch of business. It still required uncommon discernment to even notice, but the impact was unquestionable.
- mrandish 2y ago
  > finding out that a whole lot of infrastructure that was supposed to make your business better, actually isn't doing its job, is still significant. Yes, in many contexts discernment matters. More broadly, being able to tell the difference in quality or performance is relevant when you've spent more time/money/effort to have a better result. Even if "no one could tell and it was fine anyway", then you could have saved that time/money/effort and put those resources to better use.
kazinator 2y ago
Even if you can tell the difference between the way two objects sound, there is a leap between that and deciding that one is worse than the other.
aqfamnzc 2y ago
I think about this when cooking. There are 1000 variables like ingredient choice, prep methods, spices used, cook time. Changing one produces an effect too small for me to discern. But when I make suboptimal choices on 20 different variables, they stack up to produce a dish that's noticeably worse. :( How can I do science and improve my skills when I can't observe the difference changing one dimension makes!?
- josephg 2y ago
  > How can I do science and improve my skills when I can't observe the difference changing one dimension makes!? The classic answer to this is you need to improve your capacity to measure. Ie, taste ingredients and things constantly and learn with your mouth how the taste of your tomato will translate into the taste of your curry. Just like the soloist and piano tuner in this story, subtle discernment is a huge part of expertise.
HPsquared 2y ago
"You might not have noticed it, but your brain did" - H. Plinkett

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).
  - adgjlsfhk1 2y ago
    and wind instruments can and do bend their notes with their mouths to fit better in the chord than equal temperament
epicide 2y ago
> 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 "Better" is always relative, so it's often more correct to say it is/sounds "different". For example, a true temperament guitar can sound weird/"wrong" to some people. A lot of folks are used to those compromises just being part of the sound. Similar to a "honky tonk" piano: if you tuned it differently, it would come across as a timbre change more than simply "better" tuning. In the grand scheme of things, there are professions and arts that were once considered essential to everyday life and in ways that we today don't even consider. The profession is lost to time, but so is the need. It's the in-between transitional state, where the profession is in the process of dying, that is the most painful period. Some day, the last note played on a piano will be played and lament for the piano tuner will die with it.
- card_zero 2y ago
  I don't know, I guess everything ends eventually, but people still play the crumhorn, the carnyx, and the eunuch flute.

Miraste 2y ago

The internet has worsened this phenomenon. I, like many other people, have gotten into the habit of appending site:reddit.com to Google searches as search quality declines. This gives better results from actual humans (usually), but it also skews toward people who are invested enough in the topic to post about it on niche subreddits. This leads to, for example, product recommendations that are way out of alignment with what most people need, even if the information about them is true.

MrLeap 2y ago
"product recommendations that are way out of alignment with what most people need" I have to disagree. When i dont do the reddit thing, the average quality of material products has been.. very bad. Amazon reviews don't seem to be enough to choose anything with an electric motor or a hinge that won't fall apart in a month of light use.
- Miraste 2y ago
  Let me give an example: soundbars for TVs. Reddit will tell you to never buy one, because a dedicated speaker system sounds better at the same price. This is true-ish. However, a speaker system requires a large, heavy A/V unit, lots of wires, lots of space, and highly noticeable, if not outright ugly, speakers. A soundbar doesn't have any of those problems, is usually the cheaper option, and still sounds much better than built-in speakers. They're the right choice for most people, but it takes reading between the lines to parse that from reddit posts.
  - MrLeap 2y ago
    I trust people to be able to generally decide if they have the space, tolerance for cords and aesthetics to make a purchase decision like that. I'm struggling to visualize the peril in accidentally buying speakers. Personally, I'll happily pay for something with some features I don't need if it's got good build quality. Finding versions of MANY THINGS that aren't egregiously poorly made seems like it's getting harder? Maybe this is just the temporal warp of getting older. As subjective time passes by more quickly, entropy is getting more of my attention than when I was younger and a day felt long. It's possible my perception that tools are engineered to the brink of functioning by a thread is survivorship bias. All the old tools that are still trucking are just the ones that survived. No way to know for sure, but if some convincingly thrice burned carpenter on reddit makes me think I oughta buy mikita I probably will.

pclmulqdq 2y ago

> 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. Trust me, as a former piano/harpsichord tuner, that the audience absolutely can tell the difference between a perfectly tuned instrument and one that is badly tuned. They just can't put their finger on what that difference is. It's the same as when the viola section of an orchestra is out of tune or the horns drag (both very common problems for amateur symphonies). The overall effect is "muddier" and less "brilliant" than other performances, and you can tell as a listener, but very few people in the audience can say "the violas were flat in the adagio section."

AnthonyMouse 2y ago
It's worse than that. In many cases the consumer can't tell, but it still matters. Take food, for example. If the tomato on your sandwich has fewer micronutrients than a different one, you may not be able to taste it, especially after the restaurant (or you) have slathered the sandwich with sauces full of salt and sugar and fat. So you want a chef you can trust who knows how to choose a tomato (and a farmer who knows how to grow one), whether you can taste the difference or not, or the result at scale is you end up deficient in various vitamins and minerals and can't figure out why you're tired all the time.
- pixl97 2y ago
  Another analogy would be a tomato grown in contaminated soil may taste the same, you just pay for it in cancer 20 years later.
  - AnthonyMouse 2y ago
    That's not quite the same thing, because if the tomato is full of cadmium, whether or not you can taste it the 0.01% of the customers who are chemists and personally test all of their food for safety themselves are going to figure it out. Then every store will refuse shipment of any of those tomatoes and the cops will come to shoot the farmer's dog and run over the tomato field with their ludicrous panzer. Whereas if they find that the tomato has 10% as much β-carotene as a tomato should or what have you, somebody will write an article about it that six in a thousand customers read and people will keep buying those tomatoes because they're cheaper and not even required to be labeled differently. It's the difference between "so bad that people won't stand for it" and "worse, but people tolerate it", and the second one can be more of a problem specifically because people don't get mad enough about it to fix it.

mlyle 2y ago

There's stuff on the edge, though-- like there was a post here a few days ago, where the commenter was talking about deploying monitoring and measurement into workplaces and finding lots of stuff wrong, and everyone panicking. On the one hand, panicking is unproductive: nothing is worse than it was last week. On the other hand, finding out that a whole lot of infrastructure that was supposed to make your business better, actually isn't doing its job, is still significant. If your e-mail campaigns weren't clickable, and you lost a bunch of business but never noticed, you still lost a bunch of business. It still required uncommon discernment to even notice, but the impact was unquestionable.

mrandish 2y ago
> finding out that a whole lot of infrastructure that was supposed to make your business better, actually isn't doing its job, is still significant. Yes, in many contexts discernment matters. More broadly, being able to tell the difference in quality or performance is relevant when you've spent more time/money/effort to have a better result. Even if "no one could tell and it was fine anyway", then you could have saved that time/money/effort and put those resources to better use.

kazinator 2y ago

Even if you can tell the difference between the way two objects sound, there is a leap between that and deciding that one is worse than the other.

aqfamnzc 2y ago

I think about this when cooking. There are 1000 variables like ingredient choice, prep methods, spices used, cook time. Changing one produces an effect too small for me to discern. But when I make suboptimal choices on 20 different variables, they stack up to produce a dish that's noticeably worse. :( How can I do science and improve my skills when I can't observe the difference changing one dimension makes!?

josephg 2y ago
> How can I do science and improve my skills when I can't observe the difference changing one dimension makes!? The classic answer to this is you need to improve your capacity to measure. Ie, taste ingredients and things constantly and learn with your mouth how the taste of your tomato will translate into the taste of your curry. Just like the soloist and piano tuner in this story, subtle discernment is a huge part of expertise.

HPsquared 2y ago

"You might not have noticed it, but your brain did" - H. Plinkett