8 ms·

Why effort scales superlinearly with the perceived quality of creative work

159 points by eatitraw 11mo ago

turtleyacht 11mo ago
How often is a drawing really trashed and restarted? There's the saying, "Plan to throw one away," but seems like it varies in practice (for software). There are even books about patching paintings, like Master Disaster: Five Ways to Rescue Desparate Watercolors. In architecture, it's understood the people, vehicles, and landscape are not as exact as the building or structure, and books encourage reusing magazine clippings, overhead projectors, and copy machines to generally "be quick" on execution. Would like to see thoughts on comparing current process with the "Draw 50" series, where most of the skeleton is on paper by the first step, but the last is really the super-detailed, totally refined, owl.
- gilleain 11mo ago
  So i can only speak from my own experience of the last 5 years of trying (and often failing!) to accurately copy or otherwise create various drawings. Very rarely do I start completely from scratch, but usually adjust the drawing so much that maybe I should have. I wonder if I tracked the adjustments if I would find every line was redrawn in some cases. Thing is, it is hard to see what part is 'off' until most of the other parts are right. Especially with highly symmetric drawings, where symmetries appear gradually as the whole thing comes together.
- tomashubelbauer 11mo ago
  From my very limited experience with art, it's more often the case that a work in progress creation is abandoned and then taken a stab at anew later than trashed and restarted. Or it is iterated on to a degree that it is not meaningfully different from a full restart. I have a bit more experience with software and the only reason for why we don't plan throw one away is because it costs more money and the market pressure on software quality is too low to make stakeholders care. In my personal hobby coding, I often practice this (or do what I described above with art which is closer to abandoning until inspiration strikes again at which point a blank slate is more inviting). The closest thing professionally I get is a "spike" where I explore something via code with the output not being the code itself, but the knowledge attained which then becomes an input to new code writing.
  - ema 11mo ago
    While I'm always ready to throw away code when I realize that there is a better way to do things I found it quite difficult to write code with the intent to throw it away. However I often do write code with intent of modifying it once I have a better idea of what is needed. It might be because I'm comparatively better at refactoring than at starting from scratch.
- vrighter 11mo ago
  When programming stuff as a hobby, I do always plan to throw one away. The first one is where I learn my lessons and write enough spaghetti until I fully understand the problem. Then I delete the first one, and start over with the lessons learnt.
- moron4hire 11mo ago
  When I was a kid, I obsessed over getting a picture right the first time. But as I got older, I learned to do subject studies to refine tricky details before committing them to a larger piece. If you ever get the chance to see the personal effects of a famous artist, most have piles and piles of sketches and studies they've done while prepping for a larger piece.
- eschneider 11mo ago
  Hmm...a lot? For a complex work, you'll sometimes do some number of sketches and studies and drawing and underpaintings...Lots of things get tried/discarded/modified before you land on a final painting.
- creer 11mo ago
  > Draw 50 For me, "draw 50" series is about letting loose, NOT about skill. On the contrary, it's about exploring the space of all the different ways a prompt can be worked with in an UN-literal manner. Overall drawing facility will improve merely as a byproduct. The ability to be whimsical and exploit drawing flaws, erm, deliberately, is the real prize. Different from "limbering up" exercizes like drawing your hand - where you do one at the beginning of a session just because it gets you started and in the flow without having to think or pick a "real" topic. (A similar idea is to leave some already decided work mid-done: when you arrive in the morning you can work on that and limber up and do something useful without having to think clearly yet.) Different from thumbnails which are about picking a direction.
  - egypturnash 11mo ago
    I am pretty sure "draw 50" refers to Lee J. Ames' "Draw 50 Somethings" series of wordless instructional books, where "something" ranged from "animals" or "athletes" or "dinosaurs" to "Beasties and Yugglies and Turnover Uglies and Things That Go Bump in the Night". Drawing fifty instances of a thing out of your head is a good exercise but completely different from those. https://duckduckgo.com/?q=lee+j+ames+draw+50&t=osx&ia=images&iax=images https://duckduckgo.com/?q=lee+j+ames+draw+50&t=osx&ia=images...
    - creer 11mo ago
      Oh cool! Yeah it made me think of these internet challenges "I'll draw and post 1 portrait a day for the next year" or whatever. And art classes "give me 20 sheep". Where it's fine to start "literal" but you are encouraged to get bored of that quickly and become more creative with it.
- egypturnash 11mo ago
  Pro artist here. I trash and restart sketches that took a few minutes to do at most. It's very rare for me to get more than an hour or two in and discard it, I've explored and found a solid foundation long before I put that much work in. If I was working in a studio environment there's the risk of things like "I spent a couple weeks painting that bg and animating that scene and it was absolutely gorgeous but it got cut when the we took a good hard look at the remaining budget and total runtime and cut the entire sequence it was part of" but that's another matter. The Draw 50 process is solid. The classical techniques I learnt in training for animation are similar.
- TZubiri 11mo ago
  In art, while there are mistakes that can really make a drawing "wrong", there is a much wider array of valid end-states. Which is why Generative AI managed to make art way before it managed to write code. An example of this is Bob Ross' school of incorporating mistakes into the piece. Surely it's something that would fly way less in some types of drawings like anatomical ones, but especially when the motif is fantastical or even abstract, there's fewer possible mistakes to make, so there's less reason to throw something away.
- lanstin 11mo ago
  With black ink on paper, quite a few. With oil, less. It is part of the medium: how much is a flash of intuitive certainty and how much is slower planning and execution.
exasperaited 11mo ago
"Understanding Poetry, by Dr J. Evans Pritchard, PhD"
- DuperPower 11mo ago
  lol I cited this exact scene as an example of typical anglosaxon conception of art, now you are crying that art has become shit but any attempt at scientific analysis is taken as a joke when actual poetry is even harder than Code, the amount of data you can compress on a single Word and rhyimes and stuff IS the hardest thing ever, but because you dont want to think someone can do an effort you want the Robin Williams and Dead Poets society to win and make art non scientifically understandable to anyone, if you cant do scientific or technical analysis of art thats your opinión but why the obsession on trashing anyone Who does It?
  - deleted 11mo ago
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qlm 11mo ago
Perhaps a controversial view on this particular forum but I find the tendency of a certain type of person* to write about everything in this overly-technical way regardless of whether it is appropriate to the subject matter to be very tiresome ("executing cached heuristics", "constrained the search space"). *I associate it with the asinine contemporary "rationalist" movement (LessWrong et al.) but I'm not making any claims the author is associated with this.
- botanical76 11mo ago
  I mean, I talk like this as well. It's not really intentional. My interests influence the language that I use. Why is the rationalist movement asinine? I don't know much about it but it seems interesting.
- gilleain 11mo ago
  A bit harsh, but I see what you mean. It is tempting to try and fit every description of the world into a rigorous technical straightjacket, perhaps because it feels like you have understood it better? Maybe it is similar to how scientist get flack for writing in technical jargon instead of 'plain language'. Partly it is a necessity - to be unambiguous - however it is also partly a choice, a way to signal that you are doing Science, not just describing messing about with chemicals or whatever.
- auggierose 11mo ago
  Just reading the abstract, I have to agree with you.
- DuperPower 11mo ago
  no, we need more of this, the opposite of this is Robin Williams destroying the poetry theory book in dead poeta society, the result was weak kids and one of them commited suicide. More technical stuff in relation to art is a good thing, but its expected that anglosaxon people have allergy to this, they think is somehow socialist or something and they need art to be unfefined etc
  - qlm 11mo ago
dickiedyce 11mo ago
Also - the speed and quality improvements when having to redo homework lost to an undiscerning canine companion is also a corollary of this. Perhaps the time it takes to 'redo' is a better measure than last mile - it's the entire effort, minus the initial solution-space exploration?
svara 11mo ago
Perceived quality is relative. It's roughly linearly related to rank position along some dimension, but moving up in rank requires exponential effort due to competition.
- fluoridation 11mo ago
  I would be surprised if anyone perceives quality like that. Like, are you saying that in a situation where there are only two examples of some type of work, it is impossible to judge whether one is much better than the other, it is only possible to say that it's better? What makes you think it works like this?
  - Xmd5a 11mo ago
    This insight, that perceived quality is relative, can be understood in a more literary way, in this fragment by Proust describing the Rivebelle restaurant: > Soon the spectacle became arranged, in my eyes at least, in a more noble and calmer fashion. All this vertiginous activity settled into a calm harmony. I would watch the round tables, whose innumerable assemblage filled the restaurant, like so many planets, such as they are figured in old allegorical pictures. Moreover, an irresistible force of attraction was exerted between these various stars, and at each table the diners had eyes only for the tables at which they were not sitting, The relative nature of perceived quality indicates that the order of representations (artworks) is judged only in relation to the order of castes (ranking); one can only judge what is equal by comparison to what is unequal, and equivalence is not understood through equality (even approximate) but through inequality (partial order). It is the absence of a ranking relationship between two entities that establishes their equivalence. Maybe I should have just gone with "in this case, classification is more fundamental than measure", but I feel there is something interesting to be said about the structure of artworks and the structure of their reception by society, indeed Proust continues with: > ...the diners had eyes only for the tables at which they were not sitting, with the exception of some wealthy host who, having succeeded in bringing a famous writer, strove to extract from him, thanks to the spiritual properties of the 'turning table', insignificant observations at which the ladies marvelled. See ? Writers (and artists in general) take on the role of a medium. They are used to channel distant entities, like tables during spiritism sessions, and from what Proust tells us, that "the diners had eyes only for the tables at which they were not sitting", maybe we can infer that what writers channel doesn't just come from distant worlds, as incarnated in what their words represent, but as a delta in perceived quality, starting with our own. This is why I'd like to elaborate on this idea of coupled SSR processes I developed in another comment. A sample space reducing process is a process that seeks to combine atomic parts into a coherent whole by iteratively picking groups of parts that can be assembled into functional elements ready to be added to this whole. In that sense, the act of writing a long work already has the shape of a SSR process in a very simple sense: each narrative, stylistic, and conceptual choice constrains what can follow without breaking coherence. As a novel unfolds, fewer continuations remain compatible with its voice, characters, rhythms, arguments. You are not wandering freely in idea-space; you are navigating a progressively narrowed funnel of possibilities induced by your own earlier decisions. A good book is one that survives this internal reduction without collapsing. On top of that, there is a second, external funnel: the competitive ranking of works and authors. Here too the available space narrows as you move upward. The further you climb in terms of attention, recognition, or canonization, the smaller the set of works that can plausibly dislodge those already in place. Near the top, the acceptance region is tiny: most new works, even competent ones, will not significantly shift the existing order. From that perspective, perceived quality is largely tied to where a work ends up in this hierarchy, not to some independently measurable scalar. The interesting part is how these two processes couple. To have any chance of entering the higher strata of the external ranking, a work first has to survive its own internal funnel: it has to maintain coherence, depth, and a recognizable voice under increasingly tight self-imposed constraints. At the same time, the shape of the external funnel, market expectations, critical fashions, existing canons, feeds back into the act of writing by making some narrative paths feel viable and others almost unthinkable. So the writer is never optimizing in a vacuum, but always under a joint pressure: what keeps the book internally alive, and what keeps it externally legible. But what interests me more is that some works don't just suffer this coupling, they encode it. That's what you see in the Proust passage: he is not merely describing a restaurant; he is describing the optics of social distinction, the way people look at other tables, the way a famous writer is used as a medium to channel prestige, the way perception itself is structured by rankings. The text is aware of the hierarchy through which it will itself be read. It doesn't just represent a world; it stages the illusions and comparisons that make that world intelligible. That's a second-order move: the work includes within itself a model of the very mechanisms that will classify it. If you like a more structural vocabulary: natural language is massively stratified by frequency. Highly frequent words ("I", "of", "after") act as primitive binders; extremely rare words tend to live out on the leaves of the tree; in between you get heavier operators that bind large-scale entities and narratives ("terrorism" being a classic example in the grammar of public opinion). Something similar happens socially. Highly visible figures – the wealthy host, the celebrated writer, the glamorous guest – play the role of grammatical linkers in the social syntax of recognition: they bind other people, distribute attention, create or close off relational triads. Proust's "the diners had eyes only for the tables at which they were not sitting" is exactly this: desire and judgment are mediated through a few high-frequency social operators. A certain kind of writing operates precisely at that interface: it doesn't just tell a story inside the internal funnel, and it doesn't just try to climb the external ranking; it exposes and recombines the "function words" of social perception themselves: the roles, clichés, prestige tokens, feared or desired third parties (like the forever-imagined intruder in Swann's jealousy). The difficulty is not only to satisfy two nested constraints (a coherent work and a competitive position), but to produce a form that reflects on, and potentially perturbs, the very grammar that links the two. That's where the channeling comes in: literature not only represents something, it re-routes the connective tissue through which quality, status, and desire are perceived in the first place.
nilirl 11mo ago
I liked the post but can someone explain how macro choices change the acceptance volume? Is it their effect on the total number of available choices? Does picking E minor somehow give you fewer options than C major (I'm not a musician)?
- davisoneee 11mo ago
  No you have an equal number of options (minor and major are effectively transpositions/rotations...e.g. the chord progressions are "m dim M m m M M" for minor (m-minor, M-major, dim-diminished) chord progression, vs "M m m M M m dim" for major). The post is likely getting to the point that, for english-speaking/western audiences at least, you are more likely to find songs written in C major, and thus they are more familiar and 'safer'. You _can_ write great songs in Em, but it's just a little less common, so maybe requires more work to 'fit into tastes'. edit: changed 'our' to english/western audiences
- seanhunter 11mo ago
  > Does picking E minor somehow give you fewer options than C major (I'm not a musician)? Short answer: No. No matter what note you start on you have exactly the same set of options. Long answer: No. All scales (in the system of temperament used in the vast majority of music) are symmetrical groups of transpositions of certain fundamental scales.[1] These work very much like a cyclic group if you have done algebra. In the example you chose, E minor is the "relative minor" of G Major, meaning that if you play an E Aeolean mode it contains all the same notes as G Major), and G major gives you the exact same options as C Major or any other Major Scale. What Messiaen noticed is that there are grouped sets of "Modes of limited transposition" which all work this way. So the major scale (and its “modes”, meaning the scales with the same key signature of sharps or flats but starting on each degree of the major scale) can be transposed exactly 11 times without repeating. There are 3 other scales that have this property (Normally these are called the harmonic minor, melodic minor and melodic major[2]). There are also modes of limited transposition with only 1 transposition (the chromatic scale), 2 (the whole-tone scale), 3 (the "diminished scale") and so on. Messiaen explains them all in that text if you're interested. [1] This theory was first written out in full in Messiaen's "The technique of my musical language" but is usually taught as either "Late Romantic" or "Jazz" Harmony depending on where you study https://monoskop.org/images/5/50/Messiaen_Olivier_The_Technique_of_My_Musical_Language.pdf https://monoskop.org/images/5/50/Messiaen_Olivier_The_Techni... [2] If you do "classical" harmony, your college may teach you the minor scales wrong with a descending version that is just a mode of the major scale. You may also not have been taught melodic major but it's awesome. (By “wrong” here, I mean specifically Messiaen and Schoenberg would say it’s wrong because a scale is a key signature/tonal area and so can’t have different notes when a melody ascending from descending. If there are two sets of different notes, Messiaen would say they are two scales and I would agree.)
anechouapechou 11mo ago
I believe that last-mile edits do not significantly improve the quality of (most) creative work. To produce high-quality work, one must have already "cached" their "motor heuristics," which, in simpler terms, means having dedicated thousands of hours to deep and deliberate practice in their field. The definition of 'last-mile edits' is very subjective, though. If you're dealing with open systems, it's almost unthinkable to design something and not need to iterate on it until the desired outcome is achieved. In other domains, for example, playing an instrument, your skills need to have been honed previously: there's nothing that will make you sound better (without resorting to editing it electronically).
- tinkelenberg 11mo ago
  A teacher told me once that editing poetry is like trying to open a glass jar. Eventually, you have to set it down or you’ll break the thing.
contravariant 11mo ago
Just map quality q to e^q or something and it will be sublinear again. Or more directly, if your argument for why effort scales linearly with perceived quality doesn't discuss how we perceive quality then something is wrong. A more direct argument would be that it takes roughly an equal amount of effort to halve the distance from a rough work to its ideal. Going from 90% to 99% takes the same as going from 99% to 99.9% but the latter only covers a tenth of the distance. If our perception is more sensitive to the _absolute_ size of the error you get an exponential effort to improve something.
- mjburgess 11mo ago
  Your first line assumes that `q` fails to refer to an objective property. The `e^q` space isn't quality, as much as `e^t` isnt temperature (holding the property we are talking about fixed). Thus the comment ends up being circular.
  - energy123 11mo ago
    The issue was with the word "it". In the sentence, that word is acting as an indirection to both q and e^q instead of referring to a unitary thing. So yes, "it" does become linear/sublinear, but "it" is no longer the original subject of discussion.
  - contravariant 11mo ago
    I don't think you're wrong but I think I failed to convey the point I wanted to make. What I was getting at is that without an objective way of measuring the whole idea of super- or sub-linear becomes ill defined. You can kind of define something to be sub-linear by definition, so the argument becomes tautological or indeed circular. So an article that talks about perceived quality without any discussion about how people perceive quality or importantly differences in quality can say pretty much anything and it will be true for some definition of quality. You can't just silently assume perceived quality to be something objective, if you give no arguments you should assume it to be subjective.
Xmd5a 11mo ago
On a related note I wrote a few “poems” using anagrams. The principle is simple: take a short phrase and have each line in the poem be an anagram of it. You can’t do this with just any phrase; the letters need to be reasonably well balanced for the target language so you can still form pronouns, key grammatical verbs (to be, to have, etc.), and some basic structure. It becomes interesting once sentences span multiple lines and you start using little tactical tricks to keep syntax, semantics, and the overall argument coherent while respecting the anagram constraint. Using an anagram generator is of course a first step, but the landscapes it offers are mostly desert: the vast majority of candidates are nonsense, and those that are grammatical are usually thematically off relative to what you’ve already written. And yet, if the repeated anagram phrase is chosen well, it doesn’t feel that hard to build long, meaningful sentences. Subjectively, the difficulty seems to scale roughly proportionally with the length of the poem, rather than quadratically and beyond. There’s a nice connection here to Sample Space Reducing (SSR) processes. The act of picking letters from a fixed multiset to form words, and removing them as you go, is a SSR. So is sentence formation itself: each committed word constrains the space of acceptable continuations (morphology, syntax, discourse, etc.). Understanding scaling through history-dependent processes with collapsing sample space, https://arxiv.org/pdf/1407.2775 https://arxiv.org/pdf/1407.2775 > Many such stochastic processes, especially those that are associated with complex systems, become more constrained as they unfold, meaning that their sample-space, or their set of possible outcomes, reduces as they age. We demonstrate that these sample-space reducing (SSR) processes necessarily lead to Zipf’s law in the rank distributions of their outcomes. > We note that SSR processes and nesting are deeply connected to phase-space collapse in statistical physics [21, 30–32], where the number of configurations does not grow exponentially with system size (as in Markovian and ergodic systems), but grows sub-exponentially. Sub-exponential growth can be shown to hold for the phase-space growth of the SSR sequences introduced here. In conclusion we believe that SSR processes provide a new alternative view on the emergence of scaling in many natural, social, and man-made systems. In my case there are at least two coupled SSRs: (1) the anagrammatic constraint at the line level (letters being consumed), and (2) the layered SSRs of natural language that govern what counts as a well-formed and context-appropriate continuation (from morphology and syntax up through discourse and argumentation). In practice I ended up exploiting this coupling: by reserving or spending strategic words (pronouns, conjunctions, or semantically heavy terms established earlier), I could steer both the unfolding sentence and the remaining letter pool, and explore the anagram space far more effectively than a naive generator. Very hand-wavy hypothesis: natural language is a complex, multi-layered SSR engine that happens to couple extremely well to other finite SSR constraints. That makes it unusually good at “solving” certain bounded combinatorial puzzles from the inside—up to and including, say, assembling IKEA furniture. One extra nuance here: in the anagrammatic setting, the coupling between constraints is constitutive rather than merely referential. The same finite multiset of letters simultaneously supports the combinatorial constraint (what strings are formable) and the linguistic constraint (what counts as a syntactically and discursively acceptable move), so every choice is doubly binding. That’s different from cases like following IKEA instructions, where language operates as an external controller that refers to another state space (parts, tools, assembly steps) without sharing its “material” degrees of freedom. This makes the anagram case feel like a toy model where syntax and semantics are not two separate realms but two intertwined SSR layers over one shared substrate—suggesting that what we call “reference” might itself be an emergent pattern in how such nested SSR systems latch onto each other.
SebFender 11mo ago
I appreciate this post as I think too many folks focus on the end before understanding what made it there. It's kind of asking what's the movie about before watching it or especially movie trailers that essentially shows way too much. We should all take some time to better understand what brought us here to be better prepared for general creative work and uniqueness in the future...
stavros 11mo ago
Judging by the comments here, I'm the only one, but I have no idea what he's talking about. Even the abstract: > The act of creation is fractal exploration–exploitation under optimal feedback control. When resolution increases the portion of parameter space that doesn't make the artifact worse (acceptance volume) collapses. Verification latency and rate–distortion combine into a precision tax that scales superlinearly with perceived quality. Is this just saying that it's ok if doodles aren't good, but the closer you get to the finished work, the better it has to be? If your audience can't understand what the hell you're talking about for simple ideas, you've gone too far.
- 65 11mo ago
  The abstract is some of the worst writing I've read in a while. Trying to sound so very smart while being incapable of getting your point across. This whole article reeks of pretentiousness.
  - codelikeawolf 11mo ago
    Yeah, it came off as complete nonsense. If someone were talking to me like this in person, I'd probably start suspecting they were doing it to distract me while their friend was outside stealing my hubcaps.
  - stavros 11mo ago
    Yeah, to date I think the smartest writing/speaking I've seen was Feynman. The way he could explain complicated physics concepts in simple words is just unmatched.
    - optymizer 11mo ago
      Feynman's Physics lectures are proof of that: https://www.feynmanlectures.caltech.edu/ https://www.feynmanlectures.caltech.edu/ 10/10 should be required reading for all humans
  - mrob 11mo ago
    It would be clearer with a comma after "increases". Without that it's a garden-path sentence: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garden-path_sentence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garden-path_sentence You read "increases" as a transitive verb, and then reach the "collapses" at the end of the sentence and have to re-parse the whole thing when you realize it was really intransitive.
conorbergin 11mo ago
Very funny to put a bibtex citation under such a small piece of work
- MITSardine 11mo ago
  We'd be fortunate if everything that gets cited were this short (it certainly often has similar amount of useful information)
thechao 11mo ago
I had a cabinet built and the guy doing the work pointed out that the human eye is really great at detecting line-line deviation; but, building to & correcting for that deviation requires working across the whole surface. He was making an area-effort to linear-quality argument. He said every time you halved the gap, it quadrupled the effort. Also, he said that was what saw-dust & glue were for.
- sokoloff 11mo ago
  One thing I’ve learned over decades of home/DIY projects is it’s usually better to intentionally target a small overlap/reveal rather than trying to have two materials match perfectly. If you have a piece of door trim that exactly matches the piece behind, any imperfections or subsequent wood movement will be unsightly. If you instead target a 1/4” reveal, imperfections and slight wood movement are wildly less noticeable. This is “build so the 1/32” imperfection/movement doesn’t matter at all” rather than trying to halve or quarter it. (If you can make something monolithic after attaching, such as a plaster wall, you don't have to do this, but wood furniture and trim often has these intentional offsets.)
  - nradov 11mo ago
    One thing I learned from theater set construction is that you can slap some gaffer's tape and paint over any flaws, and the audience will never notice.
    - kjkjadksj 11mo ago
      The audience is like 25+ feet away to be fair. A little different in your kitchen.
      - cestith 11mo ago
        The scale is different but the principle is still quite similar.
    - bluGill 11mo ago
TheOtherHobbes 11mo ago
Bands and artists do sometimes record a banger very quickly, and no, the effort is not in muscle memory or practice. If it was in muscle memory it would be repeatable feat, and it really isn't. Some work is technically polished and you can see/hear the effort that went into it. But there's a point where extra effort makes the work less good. Music starts to sound stale and overproduced, art loses some of its directness, writing feels self-conscious. Whatever the correlation between perceived artistic merit and effort, it's a lot more complex than this article suggests.
- armonster 11mo ago
  I don't think the phenomenon you're describing is a result of the amount of effort put into the piece.
- eschneider 11mo ago
  As my old art teacher used to say, "You work on something and it gets better and better and then it turns to shit."
  - ryanchants 11mo ago
    This is a large part of the discussions in the first one or two interviews in Interviews with Francis Bacon by David Sylvester. Bacon talks about pushing to the limits of adding more to a work until it's good, and then if taken too far it ruins the work. And only very rarely can he pull it back around to good.
  - hbarka 11mo ago
    Was your old teacher’s name Cory Doctorow?
    - hbarka 11mo ago
      Edit: attempted sarcasm about enshittification
  - lanstin 11mo ago
lynguist 11mo ago
I discussed this premise with my LLM and we came to this following conclusion which I find quite elegant: > In any bounded system under feedback, refinement produces diminishing returns and narrowing tolerance, governed by a superlinear precision cost. > There isn’t one official name, but what you’ve articulated is essentially a unified formulation of the diminishing-returns / sensitivity-amplification law of creation — a pattern deep enough that it keeps being rediscovered in every domain that pushes against the limits of order.
- chrisweekly 11mo ago
  Agreed, that's an elegant conclusion. Thanks for sharing. PS Usually LLM-generated content is strongly penalized here (and with good reason). But IMHO, when clearly noting it as such, and sharing something worthwhile -- as in this case -- an exception should be made.
pram 11mo ago
The more mileage you get, the easier it is to see the mistakes in your old art (if you’re improving lol) The more refined your technique is, the harder it will be to discern mistakes and aesthetic failures. Eventually you might come to a point where you can’t improve because you literally don’t see any issues. That might be the high water mark of your ability.
creer 11mo ago
Isn't there simply a human tendency to try and find a magic formula in what is simply survivor bias? As creative projects (software, painting...) we finish or satisfactorily achieve relatively few items. And except for the most repetitive of us, these achievements are pretty different. Wide space, chaos, few satisfactory products by comparison. That doesn't bode well for "magic recipe". All the way to "rules of thumb" that we take fun in violating. So there are two issues in there: We have more taste than skill and so many of our attempts will disappoint us no matter what. And we will obsess on trying to find a magic formula - when it's rather likely that there isn't one. The "space" is large and chaotic and we might want to reassure ourselves instead that serendipity has something to do with it. Is there then place for rules of thumb? Whatever let's us get to work in the morning, I guess. For me, I do like the recognition of past track record: with a bit of age hindsight, I know I can do it - no need to dispair. That is useful and reassuring. If I just try some more - in ever varying manners, it will happen. One place for "rules of thumbs" is in them being tropes. We can get some impact on the viewer by violating them. There is a trope of learning the rules so you can violate them. For example a Rule of Thirds - can be fertile grounds for getting at the viewer. The rule doesn't do much for us, and we have no problem violating it, but our less savvy viewers might remember it and get one more whiff of meaning from the violation. And if we are less concerned with our own satisfaction and more interested in sales, we might pay attention to "what's popular these days" and produce some of that. Not all artists are dead set on personal achievement at the cost of sales. A slightly different look at such rules.
- regulation_d 11mo ago
  I follow a few landscape photographers on YouTube and really enjoy watching them go out into the field (whether it's an actual field or mountain or beach). They've got their art (at least their own style) so dialed in, that the technical details, the subject, the composition, those are almost a forgone conclusion. What matters at that point is light. And light is luck. The difference between an average image and an outstanding one lies in something beyond their control. And when fortune smiles on them, they get positively giddy. I really appreciate people who understand that they have to meet luck half way. Even though they've spent hours upon hours upon hours honing their craft, the thing that puts them over the hump is both unpredictable and uncontrollable.
corysama 11mo ago
After this you get to the commercial market for creative works. In a market that with a lot of options for consumers that are equally accessible, similarly priced, and infinitely replicable, power-law-curve nonlinear returns on quality is the norm. So, there is huge motivation to put in “just a bit more effort”. And, thus you get Crunch Time in gamedev!
- hiAndrewQuinn 11mo ago
  If you dislike crunch time, you should be thankful we live in the superlinear world, and not the sublinear world. Imagine how bad the winner take all dynamics would be if 5% extra effort from you resulted in a game that is not 2% but 2 times as good as it would be otherwise.
im3w1l 11mo ago
I think it's simply because there is a cap to how good something can be, but no cap on how much effort you can spend trying to reach perfection.
OfflineSergio 11mo ago
almost for any project I work on keep reminding myself os what I read somwhere: 90% of the project takes 90% of the time and the other 10% of the project takes another 90% of the time.
markusstrasser 11mo ago
Author here. Somehow the worst thing I ever wrote is on the front page of HN. I wrote this fast so there's jargon and bad prose. The title is deliberately dry and bland so I wasn't expecting anyone to click it. Also I slightly changed my mind on some of the claims .. might write up later. The main reason I like to think of creative work in a more abstract/formal/geometric way (acceptance volume, latency, sampling) is it's easier for me categorize tasks, modalities and domains and know how to design or work around it. It's very much biased by more own experiences making things. Also, abstract technical concept often come with nice guarantees/properties/utils to build on .. some would say that's their raison d'être. Re comments: * "this is just diminishing returns" -- ok and this is a framework for why: the non-worsening region collapses, so most micro-edits fail * "bands record bangers in an hour" –– practice tax was prepaid. The recording session is exploitation/search riding on cached heuristics imo (and it still takes hours of repeated recording/mixing/producing to actually produce a single album track). * music key example –– yes I should've picked a different one. Main point was that some choices create wider tolerance (arrangement/range/timbre) even if keys are symmetric in equal temperament
- jfvinueza 11mo ago
  maybe if you had put up more effort polishing it it wouldn't have hit the front page :)
egypturnash 11mo ago
> Drawing takes forever because you're exploring AND refining simultaneously. > We don't "rehearse" a specific drawing, we solve a novel problem in real-time. There's no cached motor sequence to execute. When you have been drawing long enough there are a lot of cached motor sequences to execute and modify. A lot of art training is simply filling this cache: spend a few hours every week drawing the human body from different angles, in a year or three you'll be able to make it up from pretty much any angle. Add in another twenty years of doing that and experimenting ways to make your tools do more of the work for you and you can dash off "sketches" that a beginner would consider finished paintings that took days to do.
- TZubiri 11mo ago
  Right, but there's no point in repeating the exact same sequences unless you are practicing, in production you always do novel stuff, in both programming and drawing. This is unlike other disciplines like music or carpentry.
  - egypturnash 11mo ago
    I have been drawing professionally for about a quarter of a century and it is my experience there are a lot of sequences that recur. A hand is a complex piece of anatomy but you really only need a mental library of a few dozen poses to meet most needs, for instance. You don't repeat it exactly every time, it's easy to change the angle a little, the lighting needs to adapt to the scene, some hands are dainty and some are big meatslabs, but that's all about as easy to adjust on the fly as, say, shifting the rhythm of a rock song you know well into a big band swing groove. You also learn a discipline we artists call "construction", wherein you can quickly break any object down into a few basic shapes that are incredibly easy to reason about in 3d, and quickly layer details atop that. Also consider a daily comic strip. How many times do you think Charles Schultz drew Charlie Brown in a single year? How many of those drawings were largely similar to each other? Now that's serious production work. Animation's similar, you probably have a wider range of angles and motion than in a 1970s newspaper comics page but you are still drawing the same character a zillion times and your hand learns stuff and spits it back out without any conscious thought on your part.
senderista 11mo ago
I have no idea what the C major/E minor example was trying to convey.
fouc 11mo ago
My takeaway from the post: The picture of the solution space in 3D makes a great point - we see a narrow hill that leads to a global maximum (i.e. a great result) in a solutions search space that otherwise has a very obvious & wide hill that produces "okay" results. Going from the okay & safe results to a great result means taking the risk of going back down the hill of shittier solutions. He points out that generative AI will tend to produce results that land on that big wide hill. It's the safe hill, and has the most results. This is perhaps where taste (as a proxy of experience) trumps AI. Interesting to tie this to the finishing stage of any work. I was definitely thinking about software development in that situation. I would argue it's similar to drawing as he mentions in the FAQ - we're solving a novel problem, as we start implementing a solution we might discover it is inappropriate and have to change to a different part of the solution space.

159 points by eatitraw 11mo ago

How often is a drawing really trashed and restarted? There's the saying, "Plan to throw one away," but seems like it varies in practice (for software). There are even books about patching paintings, like Master Disaster: Five Ways to Rescue Desparate Watercolors. In architecture, it's understood the people, vehicles, and landscape are not as exact as the building or structure, and books encourage reusing magazine clippings, overhead projectors, and copy machines to generally "be quick" on execution. Would like to see thoughts on comparing current process with the "Draw 50" series, where most of the skeleton is on paper by the first step, but the last is really the super-detailed, totally refined, owl.

gilleain 11mo ago
So i can only speak from my own experience of the last 5 years of trying (and often failing!) to accurately copy or otherwise create various drawings. Very rarely do I start completely from scratch, but usually adjust the drawing so much that maybe I should have. I wonder if I tracked the adjustments if I would find every line was redrawn in some cases. Thing is, it is hard to see what part is 'off' until most of the other parts are right. Especially with highly symmetric drawings, where symmetries appear gradually as the whole thing comes together.
tomashubelbauer 11mo ago
From my very limited experience with art, it's more often the case that a work in progress creation is abandoned and then taken a stab at anew later than trashed and restarted. Or it is iterated on to a degree that it is not meaningfully different from a full restart. I have a bit more experience with software and the only reason for why we don't plan throw one away is because it costs more money and the market pressure on software quality is too low to make stakeholders care. In my personal hobby coding, I often practice this (or do what I described above with art which is closer to abandoning until inspiration strikes again at which point a blank slate is more inviting). The closest thing professionally I get is a "spike" where I explore something via code with the output not being the code itself, but the knowledge attained which then becomes an input to new code writing.
- ema 11mo ago
  While I'm always ready to throw away code when I realize that there is a better way to do things I found it quite difficult to write code with the intent to throw it away. However I often do write code with intent of modifying it once I have a better idea of what is needed. It might be because I'm comparatively better at refactoring than at starting from scratch.
vrighter 11mo ago
When programming stuff as a hobby, I do always plan to throw one away. The first one is where I learn my lessons and write enough spaghetti until I fully understand the problem. Then I delete the first one, and start over with the lessons learnt.
moron4hire 11mo ago
When I was a kid, I obsessed over getting a picture right the first time. But as I got older, I learned to do subject studies to refine tricky details before committing them to a larger piece. If you ever get the chance to see the personal effects of a famous artist, most have piles and piles of sketches and studies they've done while prepping for a larger piece.
eschneider 11mo ago
Hmm...a lot? For a complex work, you'll sometimes do some number of sketches and studies and drawing and underpaintings...Lots of things get tried/discarded/modified before you land on a final painting.
creer 11mo ago
> Draw 50 For me, "draw 50" series is about letting loose, NOT about skill. On the contrary, it's about exploring the space of all the different ways a prompt can be worked with in an UN-literal manner. Overall drawing facility will improve merely as a byproduct. The ability to be whimsical and exploit drawing flaws, erm, deliberately, is the real prize. Different from "limbering up" exercizes like drawing your hand - where you do one at the beginning of a session just because it gets you started and in the flow without having to think or pick a "real" topic. (A similar idea is to leave some already decided work mid-done: when you arrive in the morning you can work on that and limber up and do something useful without having to think clearly yet.) Different from thumbnails which are about picking a direction.
- egypturnash 11mo ago
  I am pretty sure "draw 50" refers to Lee J. Ames' "Draw 50 Somethings" series of wordless instructional books, where "something" ranged from "animals" or "athletes" or "dinosaurs" to "Beasties and Yugglies and Turnover Uglies and Things That Go Bump in the Night". Drawing fifty instances of a thing out of your head is a good exercise but completely different from those. https://duckduckgo.com/?q=lee+j+ames+draw+50&t=osx&ia=images&iax=images https://duckduckgo.com/?q=lee+j+ames+draw+50&t=osx&ia=images...
  - creer 11mo ago
    Oh cool! Yeah it made me think of these internet challenges "I'll draw and post 1 portrait a day for the next year" or whatever. And art classes "give me 20 sheep". Where it's fine to start "literal" but you are encouraged to get bored of that quickly and become more creative with it.
egypturnash 11mo ago
Pro artist here. I trash and restart sketches that took a few minutes to do at most. It's very rare for me to get more than an hour or two in and discard it, I've explored and found a solid foundation long before I put that much work in. If I was working in a studio environment there's the risk of things like "I spent a couple weeks painting that bg and animating that scene and it was absolutely gorgeous but it got cut when the we took a good hard look at the remaining budget and total runtime and cut the entire sequence it was part of" but that's another matter. The Draw 50 process is solid. The classical techniques I learnt in training for animation are similar.
TZubiri 11mo ago
In art, while there are mistakes that can really make a drawing "wrong", there is a much wider array of valid end-states. Which is why Generative AI managed to make art way before it managed to write code. An example of this is Bob Ross' school of incorporating mistakes into the piece. Surely it's something that would fly way less in some types of drawings like anatomical ones, but especially when the motif is fantastical or even abstract, there's fewer possible mistakes to make, so there's less reason to throw something away.
lanstin 11mo ago
With black ink on paper, quite a few. With oil, less. It is part of the medium: how much is a flash of intuitive certainty and how much is slower planning and execution.

exasperaited 11mo ago

"Understanding Poetry, by Dr J. Evans Pritchard, PhD"

DuperPower 11mo ago
lol I cited this exact scene as an example of typical anglosaxon conception of art, now you are crying that art has become shit but any attempt at scientific analysis is taken as a joke when actual poetry is even harder than Code, the amount of data you can compress on a single Word and rhyimes and stuff IS the hardest thing ever, but because you dont want to think someone can do an effort you want the Robin Williams and Dead Poets society to win and make art non scientifically understandable to anyone, if you cant do scientific or technical analysis of art thats your opinión but why the obsession on trashing anyone Who does It?
- deleted 11mo ago
  [deleted]

qlm 11mo ago

Perhaps a controversial view on this particular forum but I find the tendency of a certain type of person* to write about everything in this overly-technical way regardless of whether it is appropriate to the subject matter to be very tiresome ("executing cached heuristics", "constrained the search space"). *I associate it with the asinine contemporary "rationalist" movement (LessWrong et al.) but I'm not making any claims the author is associated with this.

botanical76 11mo ago
I mean, I talk like this as well. It's not really intentional. My interests influence the language that I use. Why is the rationalist movement asinine? I don't know much about it but it seems interesting.
gilleain 11mo ago
A bit harsh, but I see what you mean. It is tempting to try and fit every description of the world into a rigorous technical straightjacket, perhaps because it feels like you have understood it better? Maybe it is similar to how scientist get flack for writing in technical jargon instead of 'plain language'. Partly it is a necessity - to be unambiguous - however it is also partly a choice, a way to signal that you are doing Science, not just describing messing about with chemicals or whatever.
auggierose 11mo ago
Just reading the abstract, I have to agree with you.
DuperPower 11mo ago
no, we need more of this, the opposite of this is Robin Williams destroying the poetry theory book in dead poeta society, the result was weak kids and one of them commited suicide. More technical stuff in relation to art is a good thing, but its expected that anglosaxon people have allergy to this, they think is somehow socialist or something and they need art to be unfefined etc
- qlm 11mo ago

dickiedyce 11mo ago

Also - the speed and quality improvements when having to redo homework lost to an undiscerning canine companion is also a corollary of this. Perhaps the time it takes to 'redo' is a better measure than last mile - it's the entire effort, minus the initial solution-space exploration?

svara 11mo ago

Perceived quality is relative. It's roughly linearly related to rank position along some dimension, but moving up in rank requires exponential effort due to competition.

fluoridation 11mo ago
I would be surprised if anyone perceives quality like that. Like, are you saying that in a situation where there are only two examples of some type of work, it is impossible to judge whether one is much better than the other, it is only possible to say that it's better? What makes you think it works like this?
- Xmd5a 11mo ago
  This insight, that perceived quality is relative, can be understood in a more literary way, in this fragment by Proust describing the Rivebelle restaurant: > Soon the spectacle became arranged, in my eyes at least, in a more noble and calmer fashion. All this vertiginous activity settled into a calm harmony. I would watch the round tables, whose innumerable assemblage filled the restaurant, like so many planets, such as they are figured in old allegorical pictures. Moreover, an irresistible force of attraction was exerted between these various stars, and at each table the diners had eyes only for the tables at which they were not sitting, The relative nature of perceived quality indicates that the order of representations (artworks) is judged only in relation to the order of castes (ranking); one can only judge what is equal by comparison to what is unequal, and equivalence is not understood through equality (even approximate) but through inequality (partial order). It is the absence of a ranking relationship between two entities that establishes their equivalence. Maybe I should have just gone with "in this case, classification is more fundamental than measure", but I feel there is something interesting to be said about the structure of artworks and the structure of their reception by society, indeed Proust continues with: > ...the diners had eyes only for the tables at which they were not sitting, with the exception of some wealthy host who, having succeeded in bringing a famous writer, strove to extract from him, thanks to the spiritual properties of the 'turning table', insignificant observations at which the ladies marvelled. See ? Writers (and artists in general) take on the role of a medium. They are used to channel distant entities, like tables during spiritism sessions, and from what Proust tells us, that "the diners had eyes only for the tables at which they were not sitting", maybe we can infer that what writers channel doesn't just come from distant worlds, as incarnated in what their words represent, but as a delta in perceived quality, starting with our own. This is why I'd like to elaborate on this idea of coupled SSR processes I developed in another comment. A sample space reducing process is a process that seeks to combine atomic parts into a coherent whole by iteratively picking groups of parts that can be assembled into functional elements ready to be added to this whole. In that sense, the act of writing a long work already has the shape of a SSR process in a very simple sense: each narrative, stylistic, and conceptual choice constrains what can follow without breaking coherence. As a novel unfolds, fewer continuations remain compatible with its voice, characters, rhythms, arguments. You are not wandering freely in idea-space; you are navigating a progressively narrowed funnel of possibilities induced by your own earlier decisions. A good book is one that survives this internal reduction without collapsing. On top of that, there is a second, external funnel: the competitive ranking of works and authors. Here too the available space narrows as you move upward. The further you climb in terms of attention, recognition, or canonization, the smaller the set of works that can plausibly dislodge those already in place. Near the top, the acceptance region is tiny: most new works, even competent ones, will not significantly shift the existing order. From that perspective, perceived quality is largely tied to where a work ends up in this hierarchy, not to some independently measurable scalar. The interesting part is how these two processes couple. To have any chance of entering the higher strata of the external ranking, a work first has to survive its own internal funnel: it has to maintain coherence, depth, and a recognizable voice under increasingly tight self-imposed constraints. At the same time, the shape of the external funnel, market expectations, critical fashions, existing canons, feeds back into the act of writing by making some narrative paths feel viable and others almost unthinkable. So the writer is never optimizing in a vacuum, but always under a joint pressure: what keeps the book internally alive, and what keeps it externally legible. But what interests me more is that some works don't just suffer this coupling, they encode it. That's what you see in the Proust passage: he is not merely describing a restaurant; he is describing the optics of social distinction, the way people look at other tables, the way a famous writer is used as a medium to channel prestige, the way perception itself is structured by rankings. The text is aware of the hierarchy through which it will itself be read. It doesn't just represent a world; it stages the illusions and comparisons that make that world intelligible. That's a second-order move: the work includes within itself a model of the very mechanisms that will classify it. If you like a more structural vocabulary: natural language is massively stratified by frequency. Highly frequent words ("I", "of", "after") act as primitive binders; extremely rare words tend to live out on the leaves of the tree; in between you get heavier operators that bind large-scale entities and narratives ("terrorism" being a classic example in the grammar of public opinion). Something similar happens socially. Highly visible figures – the wealthy host, the celebrated writer, the glamorous guest – play the role of grammatical linkers in the social syntax of recognition: they bind other people, distribute attention, create or close off relational triads. Proust's "the diners had eyes only for the tables at which they were not sitting" is exactly this: desire and judgment are mediated through a few high-frequency social operators. A certain kind of writing operates precisely at that interface: it doesn't just tell a story inside the internal funnel, and it doesn't just try to climb the external ranking; it exposes and recombines the "function words" of social perception themselves: the roles, clichés, prestige tokens, feared or desired third parties (like the forever-imagined intruder in Swann's jealousy). The difficulty is not only to satisfy two nested constraints (a coherent work and a competitive position), but to produce a form that reflects on, and potentially perturbs, the very grammar that links the two. That's where the channeling comes in: literature not only represents something, it re-routes the connective tissue through which quality, status, and desire are perceived in the first place.

nilirl 11mo ago

I liked the post but can someone explain how macro choices change the acceptance volume? Is it their effect on the total number of available choices? Does picking E minor somehow give you fewer options than C major (I'm not a musician)?

davisoneee 11mo ago
No you have an equal number of options (minor and major are effectively transpositions/rotations...e.g. the chord progressions are "m dim M m m M M" for minor (m-minor, M-major, dim-diminished) chord progression, vs "M m m M M m dim" for major). The post is likely getting to the point that, for english-speaking/western audiences at least, you are more likely to find songs written in C major, and thus they are more familiar and 'safer'. You _can_ write great songs in Em, but it's just a little less common, so maybe requires more work to 'fit into tastes'. edit: changed 'our' to english/western audiences
seanhunter 11mo ago
> Does picking E minor somehow give you fewer options than C major (I'm not a musician)? Short answer: No. No matter what note you start on you have exactly the same set of options. Long answer: No. All scales (in the system of temperament used in the vast majority of music) are symmetrical groups of transpositions of certain fundamental scales.[1] These work very much like a cyclic group if you have done algebra. In the example you chose, E minor is the "relative minor" of G Major, meaning that if you play an E Aeolean mode it contains all the same notes as G Major), and G major gives you the exact same options as C Major or any other Major Scale. What Messiaen noticed is that there are grouped sets of "Modes of limited transposition" which all work this way. So the major scale (and its “modes”, meaning the scales with the same key signature of sharps or flats but starting on each degree of the major scale) can be transposed exactly 11 times without repeating. There are 3 other scales that have this property (Normally these are called the harmonic minor, melodic minor and melodic major[2]). There are also modes of limited transposition with only 1 transposition (the chromatic scale), 2 (the whole-tone scale), 3 (the "diminished scale") and so on. Messiaen explains them all in that text if you're interested. [1] This theory was first written out in full in Messiaen's "The technique of my musical language" but is usually taught as either "Late Romantic" or "Jazz" Harmony depending on where you study https://monoskop.org/images/5/50/Messiaen_Olivier_The_Technique_of_My_Musical_Language.pdf https://monoskop.org/images/5/50/Messiaen_Olivier_The_Techni... [2] If you do "classical" harmony, your college may teach you the minor scales wrong with a descending version that is just a mode of the major scale. You may also not have been taught melodic major but it's awesome. (By “wrong” here, I mean specifically Messiaen and Schoenberg would say it’s wrong because a scale is a key signature/tonal area and so can’t have different notes when a melody ascending from descending. If there are two sets of different notes, Messiaen would say they are two scales and I would agree.)

anechouapechou 11mo ago

I believe that last-mile edits do not significantly improve the quality of (most) creative work. To produce high-quality work, one must have already "cached" their "motor heuristics," which, in simpler terms, means having dedicated thousands of hours to deep and deliberate practice in their field. The definition of 'last-mile edits' is very subjective, though. If you're dealing with open systems, it's almost unthinkable to design something and not need to iterate on it until the desired outcome is achieved. In other domains, for example, playing an instrument, your skills need to have been honed previously: there's nothing that will make you sound better (without resorting to editing it electronically).

tinkelenberg 11mo ago
A teacher told me once that editing poetry is like trying to open a glass jar. Eventually, you have to set it down or you’ll break the thing.

contravariant 11mo ago

Just map quality q to e^q or something and it will be sublinear again. Or more directly, if your argument for why effort scales linearly with perceived quality doesn't discuss how we perceive quality then something is wrong. A more direct argument would be that it takes roughly an equal amount of effort to halve the distance from a rough work to its ideal. Going from 90% to 99% takes the same as going from 99% to 99.9% but the latter only covers a tenth of the distance. If our perception is more sensitive to the _absolute_ size of the error you get an exponential effort to improve something.

mjburgess 11mo ago
Your first line assumes that `q` fails to refer to an objective property. The `e^q` space isn't quality, as much as `e^t` isnt temperature (holding the property we are talking about fixed). Thus the comment ends up being circular.
- energy123 11mo ago
  The issue was with the word "it". In the sentence, that word is acting as an indirection to both q and e^q instead of referring to a unitary thing. So yes, "it" does become linear/sublinear, but "it" is no longer the original subject of discussion.
- contravariant 11mo ago
  I don't think you're wrong but I think I failed to convey the point I wanted to make. What I was getting at is that without an objective way of measuring the whole idea of super- or sub-linear becomes ill defined. You can kind of define something to be sub-linear by definition, so the argument becomes tautological or indeed circular. So an article that talks about perceived quality without any discussion about how people perceive quality or importantly differences in quality can say pretty much anything and it will be true for some definition of quality. You can't just silently assume perceived quality to be something objective, if you give no arguments you should assume it to be subjective.

Xmd5a 11mo ago

On a related note I wrote a few “poems” using anagrams. The principle is simple: take a short phrase and have each line in the poem be an anagram of it. You can’t do this with just any phrase; the letters need to be reasonably well balanced for the target language so you can still form pronouns, key grammatical verbs (to be, to have, etc.), and some basic structure. It becomes interesting once sentences span multiple lines and you start using little tactical tricks to keep syntax, semantics, and the overall argument coherent while respecting the anagram constraint. Using an anagram generator is of course a first step, but the landscapes it offers are mostly desert: the vast majority of candidates are nonsense, and those that are grammatical are usually thematically off relative to what you’ve already written. And yet, if the repeated anagram phrase is chosen well, it doesn’t feel that hard to build long, meaningful sentences. Subjectively, the difficulty seems to scale roughly proportionally with the length of the poem, rather than quadratically and beyond. There’s a nice connection here to Sample Space Reducing (SSR) processes. The act of picking letters from a fixed multiset to form words, and removing them as you go, is a SSR. So is sentence formation itself: each committed word constrains the space of acceptable continuations (morphology, syntax, discourse, etc.). Understanding scaling through history-dependent processes with collapsing sample space, https://arxiv.org/pdf/1407.2775 https://arxiv.org/pdf/1407.2775 > Many such stochastic processes, especially those that are associated with complex systems, become more constrained as they unfold, meaning that their sample-space, or their set of possible outcomes, reduces as they age. We demonstrate that these sample-space reducing (SSR) processes necessarily lead to Zipf’s law in the rank distributions of their outcomes. > We note that SSR processes and nesting are deeply connected to phase-space collapse in statistical physics [21, 30–32], where the number of configurations does not grow exponentially with system size (as in Markovian and ergodic systems), but grows sub-exponentially. Sub-exponential growth can be shown to hold for the phase-space growth of the SSR sequences introduced here. In conclusion we believe that SSR processes provide a new alternative view on the emergence of scaling in many natural, social, and man-made systems. In my case there are at least two coupled SSRs: (1) the anagrammatic constraint at the line level (letters being consumed), and (2) the layered SSRs of natural language that govern what counts as a well-formed and context-appropriate continuation (from morphology and syntax up through discourse and argumentation). In practice I ended up exploiting this coupling: by reserving or spending strategic words (pronouns, conjunctions, or semantically heavy terms established earlier), I could steer both the unfolding sentence and the remaining letter pool, and explore the anagram space far more effectively than a naive generator. Very hand-wavy hypothesis: natural language is a complex, multi-layered SSR engine that happens to couple extremely well to other finite SSR constraints. That makes it unusually good at “solving” certain bounded combinatorial puzzles from the inside—up to and including, say, assembling IKEA furniture. One extra nuance here: in the anagrammatic setting, the coupling between constraints is constitutive rather than merely referential. The same finite multiset of letters simultaneously supports the combinatorial constraint (what strings are formable) and the linguistic constraint (what counts as a syntactically and discursively acceptable move), so every choice is doubly binding. That’s different from cases like following IKEA instructions, where language operates as an external controller that refers to another state space (parts, tools, assembly steps) without sharing its “material” degrees of freedom. This makes the anagram case feel like a toy model where syntax and semantics are not two separate realms but two intertwined SSR layers over one shared substrate—suggesting that what we call “reference” might itself be an emergent pattern in how such nested SSR systems latch onto each other.

SebFender 11mo ago

I appreciate this post as I think too many folks focus on the end before understanding what made it there. It's kind of asking what's the movie about before watching it or especially movie trailers that essentially shows way too much. We should all take some time to better understand what brought us here to be better prepared for general creative work and uniqueness in the future...

stavros 11mo ago

Judging by the comments here, I'm the only one, but I have no idea what he's talking about. Even the abstract: > The act of creation is fractal exploration–exploitation under optimal feedback control. When resolution increases the portion of parameter space that doesn't make the artifact worse (acceptance volume) collapses. Verification latency and rate–distortion combine into a precision tax that scales superlinearly with perceived quality. Is this just saying that it's ok if doodles aren't good, but the closer you get to the finished work, the better it has to be? If your audience can't understand what the hell you're talking about for simple ideas, you've gone too far.

65 11mo ago
The abstract is some of the worst writing I've read in a while. Trying to sound so very smart while being incapable of getting your point across. This whole article reeks of pretentiousness.
- codelikeawolf 11mo ago
  Yeah, it came off as complete nonsense. If someone were talking to me like this in person, I'd probably start suspecting they were doing it to distract me while their friend was outside stealing my hubcaps.
- stavros 11mo ago
  Yeah, to date I think the smartest writing/speaking I've seen was Feynman. The way he could explain complicated physics concepts in simple words is just unmatched.
  - optymizer 11mo ago
    Feynman's Physics lectures are proof of that: https://www.feynmanlectures.caltech.edu/ https://www.feynmanlectures.caltech.edu/ 10/10 should be required reading for all humans
- mrob 11mo ago
  It would be clearer with a comma after "increases". Without that it's a garden-path sentence: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garden-path_sentence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garden-path_sentence You read "increases" as a transitive verb, and then reach the "collapses" at the end of the sentence and have to re-parse the whole thing when you realize it was really intransitive.

conorbergin 11mo ago

Very funny to put a bibtex citation under such a small piece of work

MITSardine 11mo ago
We'd be fortunate if everything that gets cited were this short (it certainly often has similar amount of useful information)

thechao 11mo ago

I had a cabinet built and the guy doing the work pointed out that the human eye is really great at detecting line-line deviation; but, building to & correcting for that deviation requires working across the whole surface. He was making an area-effort to linear-quality argument. He said every time you halved the gap, it quadrupled the effort. Also, he said that was what saw-dust & glue were for.

sokoloff 11mo ago
One thing I’ve learned over decades of home/DIY projects is it’s usually better to intentionally target a small overlap/reveal rather than trying to have two materials match perfectly. If you have a piece of door trim that exactly matches the piece behind, any imperfections or subsequent wood movement will be unsightly. If you instead target a 1/4” reveal, imperfections and slight wood movement are wildly less noticeable. This is “build so the 1/32” imperfection/movement doesn’t matter at all” rather than trying to halve or quarter it. (If you can make something monolithic after attaching, such as a plaster wall, you don't have to do this, but wood furniture and trim often has these intentional offsets.)
- nradov 11mo ago
  One thing I learned from theater set construction is that you can slap some gaffer's tape and paint over any flaws, and the audience will never notice.
  - kjkjadksj 11mo ago
    The audience is like 25+ feet away to be fair. A little different in your kitchen.
    - cestith 11mo ago
      The scale is different but the principle is still quite similar.
  - bluGill 11mo ago

TheOtherHobbes 11mo ago

Bands and artists do sometimes record a banger very quickly, and no, the effort is not in muscle memory or practice. If it was in muscle memory it would be repeatable feat, and it really isn't. Some work is technically polished and you can see/hear the effort that went into it. But there's a point where extra effort makes the work less good. Music starts to sound stale and overproduced, art loses some of its directness, writing feels self-conscious. Whatever the correlation between perceived artistic merit and effort, it's a lot more complex than this article suggests.

armonster 11mo ago
I don't think the phenomenon you're describing is a result of the amount of effort put into the piece.
eschneider 11mo ago
As my old art teacher used to say, "You work on something and it gets better and better and then it turns to shit."
- ryanchants 11mo ago
  This is a large part of the discussions in the first one or two interviews in Interviews with Francis Bacon by David Sylvester. Bacon talks about pushing to the limits of adding more to a work until it's good, and then if taken too far it ruins the work. And only very rarely can he pull it back around to good.
- hbarka 11mo ago
  Was your old teacher’s name Cory Doctorow?
  - hbarka 11mo ago
    Edit: attempted sarcasm about enshittification
- lanstin 11mo ago

lynguist 11mo ago

I discussed this premise with my LLM and we came to this following conclusion which I find quite elegant: > In any bounded system under feedback, refinement produces diminishing returns and narrowing tolerance, governed by a superlinear precision cost. > There isn’t one official name, but what you’ve articulated is essentially a unified formulation of the diminishing-returns / sensitivity-amplification law of creation — a pattern deep enough that it keeps being rediscovered in every domain that pushes against the limits of order.

chrisweekly 11mo ago
Agreed, that's an elegant conclusion. Thanks for sharing. PS Usually LLM-generated content is strongly penalized here (and with good reason). But IMHO, when clearly noting it as such, and sharing something worthwhile -- as in this case -- an exception should be made.

pram 11mo ago

The more mileage you get, the easier it is to see the mistakes in your old art (if you’re improving lol) The more refined your technique is, the harder it will be to discern mistakes and aesthetic failures. Eventually you might come to a point where you can’t improve because you literally don’t see any issues. That might be the high water mark of your ability.

creer 11mo ago

Isn't there simply a human tendency to try and find a magic formula in what is simply survivor bias? As creative projects (software, painting...) we finish or satisfactorily achieve relatively few items. And except for the most repetitive of us, these achievements are pretty different. Wide space, chaos, few satisfactory products by comparison. That doesn't bode well for "magic recipe". All the way to "rules of thumb" that we take fun in violating. So there are two issues in there: We have more taste than skill and so many of our attempts will disappoint us no matter what. And we will obsess on trying to find a magic formula - when it's rather likely that there isn't one. The "space" is large and chaotic and we might want to reassure ourselves instead that serendipity has something to do with it. Is there then place for rules of thumb? Whatever let's us get to work in the morning, I guess. For me, I do like the recognition of past track record: with a bit of age hindsight, I know I can do it - no need to dispair. That is useful and reassuring. If I just try some more - in ever varying manners, it will happen. One place for "rules of thumbs" is in them being tropes. We can get some impact on the viewer by violating them. There is a trope of learning the rules so you can violate them. For example a Rule of Thirds - can be fertile grounds for getting at the viewer. The rule doesn't do much for us, and we have no problem violating it, but our less savvy viewers might remember it and get one more whiff of meaning from the violation. And if we are less concerned with our own satisfaction and more interested in sales, we might pay attention to "what's popular these days" and produce some of that. Not all artists are dead set on personal achievement at the cost of sales. A slightly different look at such rules.

regulation_d 11mo ago
I follow a few landscape photographers on YouTube and really enjoy watching them go out into the field (whether it's an actual field or mountain or beach). They've got their art (at least their own style) so dialed in, that the technical details, the subject, the composition, those are almost a forgone conclusion. What matters at that point is light. And light is luck. The difference between an average image and an outstanding one lies in something beyond their control. And when fortune smiles on them, they get positively giddy. I really appreciate people who understand that they have to meet luck half way. Even though they've spent hours upon hours upon hours honing their craft, the thing that puts them over the hump is both unpredictable and uncontrollable.

corysama 11mo ago

After this you get to the commercial market for creative works. In a market that with a lot of options for consumers that are equally accessible, similarly priced, and infinitely replicable, power-law-curve nonlinear returns on quality is the norm. So, there is huge motivation to put in “just a bit more effort”. And, thus you get Crunch Time in gamedev!

hiAndrewQuinn 11mo ago
If you dislike crunch time, you should be thankful we live in the superlinear world, and not the sublinear world. Imagine how bad the winner take all dynamics would be if 5% extra effort from you resulted in a game that is not 2% but 2 times as good as it would be otherwise.

im3w1l 11mo ago

I think it's simply because there is a cap to how good something can be, but no cap on how much effort you can spend trying to reach perfection.

OfflineSergio 11mo ago

almost for any project I work on keep reminding myself os what I read somwhere: 90% of the project takes 90% of the time and the other 10% of the project takes another 90% of the time.

markusstrasser 11mo ago

Author here. Somehow the worst thing I ever wrote is on the front page of HN. I wrote this fast so there's jargon and bad prose. The title is deliberately dry and bland so I wasn't expecting anyone to click it. Also I slightly changed my mind on some of the claims .. might write up later. The main reason I like to think of creative work in a more abstract/formal/geometric way (acceptance volume, latency, sampling) is it's easier for me categorize tasks, modalities and domains and know how to design or work around it. It's very much biased by more own experiences making things. Also, abstract technical concept often come with nice guarantees/properties/utils to build on .. some would say that's their raison d'être. Re comments: * "this is just diminishing returns" -- ok and this is a framework for why: the non-worsening region collapses, so most micro-edits fail * "bands record bangers in an hour" –– practice tax was prepaid. The recording session is exploitation/search riding on cached heuristics imo (and it still takes hours of repeated recording/mixing/producing to actually produce a single album track). * music key example –– yes I should've picked a different one. Main point was that some choices create wider tolerance (arrangement/range/timbre) even if keys are symmetric in equal temperament

jfvinueza 11mo ago
maybe if you had put up more effort polishing it it wouldn't have hit the front page :)

egypturnash 11mo ago

> Drawing takes forever because you're exploring AND refining simultaneously. > We don't "rehearse" a specific drawing, we solve a novel problem in real-time. There's no cached motor sequence to execute. When you have been drawing long enough there are a lot of cached motor sequences to execute and modify. A lot of art training is simply filling this cache: spend a few hours every week drawing the human body from different angles, in a year or three you'll be able to make it up from pretty much any angle. Add in another twenty years of doing that and experimenting ways to make your tools do more of the work for you and you can dash off "sketches" that a beginner would consider finished paintings that took days to do.

TZubiri 11mo ago
Right, but there's no point in repeating the exact same sequences unless you are practicing, in production you always do novel stuff, in both programming and drawing. This is unlike other disciplines like music or carpentry.
- egypturnash 11mo ago
  I have been drawing professionally for about a quarter of a century and it is my experience there are a lot of sequences that recur. A hand is a complex piece of anatomy but you really only need a mental library of a few dozen poses to meet most needs, for instance. You don't repeat it exactly every time, it's easy to change the angle a little, the lighting needs to adapt to the scene, some hands are dainty and some are big meatslabs, but that's all about as easy to adjust on the fly as, say, shifting the rhythm of a rock song you know well into a big band swing groove. You also learn a discipline we artists call "construction", wherein you can quickly break any object down into a few basic shapes that are incredibly easy to reason about in 3d, and quickly layer details atop that. Also consider a daily comic strip. How many times do you think Charles Schultz drew Charlie Brown in a single year? How many of those drawings were largely similar to each other? Now that's serious production work. Animation's similar, you probably have a wider range of angles and motion than in a 1970s newspaper comics page but you are still drawing the same character a zillion times and your hand learns stuff and spits it back out without any conscious thought on your part.

senderista 11mo ago

I have no idea what the C major/E minor example was trying to convey.

fouc 11mo ago

My takeaway from the post: The picture of the solution space in 3D makes a great point - we see a narrow hill that leads to a global maximum (i.e. a great result) in a solutions search space that otherwise has a very obvious & wide hill that produces "okay" results. Going from the okay & safe results to a great result means taking the risk of going back down the hill of shittier solutions. He points out that generative AI will tend to produce results that land on that big wide hill. It's the safe hill, and has the most results. This is perhaps where taste (as a proxy of experience) trumps AI. Interesting to tie this to the finishing stage of any work. I was definitely thinking about software development in that situation. I would argue it's similar to drawing as he mentions in the FAQ - we're solving a novel problem, as we start implementing a solution we might discover it is inappropriate and have to change to a different part of the solution space.