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Well, there's at least one perspective (accurate or not) from which your point doesn't hold. As a hypothetical, assume that perception of quality within a doma

Well, there's at least one perspective (accurate or not) from which your point doesn't hold. As a hypothetical, assume that perception of quality within a domain is actually a trained skill, improved by incremental refinement via new experiences within the domain. Further, assume that highly-trained individuals can perceive greater detail, and from that can derive greater enjoyment. That is, a novice is overwhelmed by a few of the most obvious features, whereas an expert picks out subtleties and contrasts and has a richer, more enjoyable experience (there may be a parallel here to the blub paradox). Under such a scenario, most novices (being unable to perceive subtleties) would tend to congregate around only a few examples in the domain that happen to provide the best experience at the broad, obvious level; a local maximum of enjoyment. However, by persuading a novice to experience additional examples that at the obvious levels may seem less appealing, they will gain both expertise and a deeper enjoyment of the domain, at the expense of growing bored with the simpler examples that lack subtleties. New creations in the domain seeking to maximize exposure would tend to the minimum complexity level needed to appeal to a sufficiently large portion of the population. Lower complexity means fewer people expanding their experiences, reducing the overall level of expertise, lowering the minimum, and so on. Given the assumption earlier that experts obtain greater enjoyment from the domain, this results in a globally suboptimal outcome from individually sensible choices. Of course, a fair number of people would disagree with one or both of the assumptions above (myself included). But I suspect many people who bemoan loss of quality would to some extent agree with the scenario I described, wherein quality is indeed valuable without there being demand for it.

m_eiman 17y ago
wherein quality is indeed valuable without there being demand for it Value is derived from demand and supply. If there is no demand, there can be no value. If there is demand, there will be value (per supplied unit) if the supply isn't too plentiful. This should mean that, in your example, entry level content should be plentiful and cheap, while the advanced content should be scarce and expensive. Hopefully for the producers of advanced content, the advanced audience will get so much more enjoyment per unit of content that they feel the higher price is justified. To say that more people "should" go through the effort of learning to like the advanced content is pretty elitist, but most of all it doesn't take into consideration everything that they are doing in their lives. Just because some college students think it's worthwhile to learn the intricacies of some obscure tv series it doesn't mean that it's worthwhile for everyone else.
- gloob 17y ago
  Value is derived from demand and supply. I suspect that the post you are responding to disagrees with this (at least hypothetically). They contend that value is a more-or-less innate quality that the skilled are best at recognizing. Stating your position baldly isn't a particularly strong counterargument. To say that more people "should" go through the effort of learning to like the advanced content is pretty elitist Doesn't matter whether it's elitist, in the same way that it doesn't matter whether Darwin caused the Holocaust. The fact that the consequences are unpleasant does not mean that the assertion is untrue.
  - m_eiman 17y ago
    They contend that value is a more-or-less innate quality that the skilled are best at recognizing. Stating your position baldly isn't a particularly strong counterargument. Value, in the money sense, is what someone is prepared to pay. That's the kind of value I was referring to. Doesn't matter whether it's elitist, in the same way that it doesn't matter whether Darwin caused the Holocaust. Godwin's law. The fact that the consequences are unpleasant does not mean that the assertion is untrue. You ignored the second part of my conclusion: everyone has limited time, and they have to select a subset of what is possible that they will actually do. Also: the post I was responding to was talking about trying to maximize global enjoyment, and proposed that if everyone decided to become experts in a single narrow field of content everyone would be better off. This, however, is also unlikely to find the global maximum. How will everyone know which tiny subfield has the biggest potential for enjoyment? Without trying a lot of different routes to enjoyment, it's very unlikely that they will choose the best one by pure chance. Compare this to genetic algorithms; you need randomness to escape a local maximum. Another problem with the proposed solution is that different people have different personalities and it's very unlikely that a single narrow field will appeal to everyone. Some subset of the population will get lots of enjoyment, while another subset will be bored to tears. That's not going to improve average enjoyment.
    - camccann 17y ago
      Value, in the money sense, is what someone is prepared to pay. That's the kind of value I was referring to. Which is indeed one possible definition of the word, but not the most useful one in a world where rational economic agents don't exist. The average person's intuitive sense of how much they value something doesn't necessarily bear any relation to how much they'd pay for it. For instance, in memetichazard's post above: "Or, if the value of such things is great enough, then the demand will be there to pay for it." Under the economic definition of value this can be loosely paraphrased as "If people are willing to pay enough for these things, there will be enough to demand to pay for it", a statement which is tautological and rather inane, allowing us to infer that memetichazard probably intended some other meaning for "value". Under any other definition of "value", including most common use, it's entirely possible (or even likely) for something to have a value unrelated to its price or market demand.

m_eiman 17y ago

wherein quality is indeed valuable without there being demand for it Value is derived from demand and supply. If there is no demand, there can be no value. If there is demand, there will be value (per supplied unit) if the supply isn't too plentiful. This should mean that, in your example, entry level content should be plentiful and cheap, while the advanced content should be scarce and expensive. Hopefully for the producers of advanced content, the advanced audience will get so much more enjoyment per unit of content that they feel the higher price is justified. To say that more people "should" go through the effort of learning to like the advanced content is pretty elitist, but most of all it doesn't take into consideration everything that they are doing in their lives. Just because some college students think it's worthwhile to learn the intricacies of some obscure tv series it doesn't mean that it's worthwhile for everyone else.

gloob 17y ago
Value is derived from demand and supply. I suspect that the post you are responding to disagrees with this (at least hypothetically). They contend that value is a more-or-less innate quality that the skilled are best at recognizing. Stating your position baldly isn't a particularly strong counterargument. To say that more people "should" go through the effort of learning to like the advanced content is pretty elitist Doesn't matter whether it's elitist, in the same way that it doesn't matter whether Darwin caused the Holocaust. The fact that the consequences are unpleasant does not mean that the assertion is untrue.
- m_eiman 17y ago
  They contend that value is a more-or-less innate quality that the skilled are best at recognizing. Stating your position baldly isn't a particularly strong counterargument. Value, in the money sense, is what someone is prepared to pay. That's the kind of value I was referring to. Doesn't matter whether it's elitist, in the same way that it doesn't matter whether Darwin caused the Holocaust. Godwin's law. The fact that the consequences are unpleasant does not mean that the assertion is untrue. You ignored the second part of my conclusion: everyone has limited time, and they have to select a subset of what is possible that they will actually do. Also: the post I was responding to was talking about trying to maximize global enjoyment, and proposed that if everyone decided to become experts in a single narrow field of content everyone would be better off. This, however, is also unlikely to find the global maximum. How will everyone know which tiny subfield has the biggest potential for enjoyment? Without trying a lot of different routes to enjoyment, it's very unlikely that they will choose the best one by pure chance. Compare this to genetic algorithms; you need randomness to escape a local maximum. Another problem with the proposed solution is that different people have different personalities and it's very unlikely that a single narrow field will appeal to everyone. Some subset of the population will get lots of enjoyment, while another subset will be bored to tears. That's not going to improve average enjoyment.
  - camccann 17y ago
    Value, in the money sense, is what someone is prepared to pay. That's the kind of value I was referring to. Which is indeed one possible definition of the word, but not the most useful one in a world where rational economic agents don't exist. The average person's intuitive sense of how much they value something doesn't necessarily bear any relation to how much they'd pay for it. For instance, in memetichazard's post above: "Or, if the value of such things is great enough, then the demand will be there to pay for it." Under the economic definition of value this can be loosely paraphrased as "If people are willing to pay enough for these things, there will be enough to demand to pay for it", a statement which is tautological and rather inane, allowing us to infer that memetichazard probably intended some other meaning for "value". Under any other definition of "value", including most common use, it's entirely possible (or even likely) for something to have a value unrelated to its price or market demand.