Review: The Clockwork Muse, by Colin Martindale 1990 · 3:34am Dec 12th, 2015
The Clockwork Muse: The predictability of artistic change
Colin Martindale, Harper Collins, 1990 (on Amazon)
You know how I always gripe that nobody does literary theory anymore? This is real artistic theory. Martindale studied thousands of poems, paintings, musical compositions, and a few pieces of fiction, using tests with human subjects and with computers. He came up with interesting questions, and tried to form hypotheses, conduct experiments to test them, and evaluate them using sound statistical methods.
I say “tried” because, unfortunately, he didn’t understand the principle of conservation of evidence, and didn’t understand statistics very well. But he raised interesting questions, answered some of them, and showed how to answer more of them. His work is remarkable for almost successfully taking a scientific approach to art.
The extent to which literary theorists ignored him is also remarkable. But Martindale was a professor of psychology, and published most of his results in psychology or computer science journals. I don’t know whether this was by choice, or because literary journals wouldn’t take them. He published quite a few in Poetics. I don’t think Poetics is a mainstream literary journal, since its guidelines request papers in sociology, psychology, media and communication studies, and economics.
The Good
Martindale did a lot of experiments, mostly in support of his central thesis (see under “The Ugly Details”):
- Artists are always trying to make their work more strange or surprising.
- They can make their work more surprising either by using more “primordial content” (basically randomness), or by creating a new style.
- New styles therefore appear at a regular rate over time, when the content presented in the previous style has become as random as it can be.
- This accounts for almost all stylistic change, throughout all of history, across all art forms.
If his analyses had been correct, he would have an overwhelming amount of evidence in favor of this (somewhat repugnant) thesis. As it is, it’s hard to say how much evidence is left when you throw out all the bad statistics, optimistic curve-gazing, and post-hoc rationalization, but I think it’s significantly more than zero.
The irony is that other aesthetic theorists had no way of knowing how bad Martindale’s use of statistics was. They knew even less about statistics. They ignored him correctly, but unjustifiably. Or perhaps this incident justifies their ignoring scientific incursions into literature, and explains the hostility between C. P. Snow's "two cultures" (the sciences and the humanities): Anyone from a scientific discipline can rush into a humanity and terrorize its inhabitants, brandishing graphs and chanting p-values. If our hapless "humanitarians" admit that science works, they'll be helpless against him, because they won't be able to tell whether his science is good or bad. (Let us suppose, in the name of democracy, that the same holds for incursions from the humanities into the sciences.)
Chapter 7, "Cross-National, Cross-Genre, and Cross-Media Synchrony", section 2 on cross-media styles: This experiment showed that the terms "baroque", "romantic", and "neoclassical" mean something other than just "what people did during an arbitrarily-bounded time period". Martindale said this is now an unpopular belief.
Martindale doesn't get into any of this, but I'll explain why I think post-modernists are suspicious of the idea that "baroque" by itself means something other than an arbitrary, socially-agreed-on time period. It's important. Well, if you care about philosophy or art theory.
A lexeme is a word or set of words whose semantic meaning is not clearly composed of the semantic meanings of its parts. "Run" can be a lexeme, but when it's in "run up a bill", that whole phrase is the lexeme, because "running up a bill" doesn't involve anybody running, or any movement up, and you can't "run up a credit" or "run up a reputation".
Post-modernists believe that the meaning of any lexeme doesn't ultimately reside in properties of the thing or event the lexeme refers to, but in the position of the lexeme in a giant graph describing the relationships between all the lexemes of the language. Call that belief S (for "Structuralism"). For example, we might say that the meaning of the term "love" was that two people who were in the relationship "love" had mutual intentions towards each other with positive emotional valences (wishing each other good health, respect, satisfying work, wealth, etc.), while "hate" referred to a relationship between people who mutually held intentions with negative valence towards each other (wishing each other harm, humiliation, and financial ruin).
A post-modernist additionally says meaning is indeterminate. That means that if we met an alien species which used the terms "mikto" and "klaanbart" to refer to relationships between people who held mutual intentions of the same valence, we would have no way of ever knowing which meant "love" and which meant "hate", because we couldn't feel the valences of their emotions, and might misinterpret their facial emotions and all other indicators in a systematically wrong way. To be more precise, the post-modernist would say that we can't be wrong in this fashion, because "love", "hate", "mikto", and "klaanbart" have no meaning other than enabling you to predict that if Jerry "loves" Sally he is more likely to give her chocolates than scrapings from the bottom of his shoe, and if Freemulo miktos Gromblat, ze is more likely to frondle zim than to blammo zim. (This sort of argument comes from Quine.) The argument fails in this case if we believe that pain is a universal evolved perception of negative valence to prevent organisms from harming themselves. We then expect to find either "mikto" or "klaanbart" associated much more often with actions that cause harm, and we can call that one "hate".
If you try to enumerate the set of relationships baroque music is in, the instantiations of "baroque music" are all instances of music, and not instances of painting, literature, or architecture. If the true "meaning" of "baroque music" were found at such a high level of abstraction that it also applied to instances of music, painting, and literature, that would imply a degree of coherence and orderliness to reality that is at odds with post-modern semiotics. So post-modernists are likely to treat "baroque music" as a lexeme, and say that "baroque music" "means", mainly, the set of relationships between the people using the term, the music, the instruments used, the musicians, the composers, and so on, and probably has little to do with “baroque architecture”.
For a more logical explanation:
The belief S was posited by Saussure as an alternative to the belief that the meanings of words are "grounded" in reality, which I'll denote by G. Philosophers see S and G as mutually exclusive, and as covering all possible cases: S ⇔ not(G). (There's no reason to believe either of these things, however. In fact it's generally impossible to try to list the (verbal) relationships between words without running into relationships that imply facts about the entities that are grounded in reality. We might, for instance, find that baroque music was usually commissioned by the Church or by extremely wealthy patrons, and so was played in churches or very large private residences, which had large dimensions and so had long reverberation times, and this led to the use of low-pitched instruments and slow tempos. Trying to list the "structure" of relationships that define "baroque music" has led to a quantifiable, measurable property of the music itself, which grounds its meaning in reality.)
Let D (for "Decomposability") denote the belief that words are usually lexemes, and so "baroque" in "baroque music" probably has the same meaning as "baroque" in "baroque architecture", even though there are no instances of art that are both baroque music and baroque architecture. There's no logical necessity to D => G or G => D. The term "baroque music" could be a lexeme whether or not its meaning is grounded in reality, and even if "baroque music" is defined structurally, it could be that "baroque" has its own structural definition. But philosophers appear to assume that D ⇔ G, probably because “folk metaphysics” assumes both D and G. It does at least seem that G weakly implies D, because given G, you could follow the folk-linguistics model of coming up with words to describe real things, and then putting them together to describe combinations of things and relationships between them.
So, given the false assumptions S ⇔ not(G) and D => G, the post-modern commitment to S implies not(G), which implies not(D), which suggests that "baroque" doesn't mean anything on its own.
Martindale showed people who didn’t know much about art pictures of paintings, sculpture, and architecture, and played them recordings of music. When he asked them to put them together into groups, in any way they chose, they put the baroque music with the baroque painting, the baroque sculpture, and the baroque architecture, and so on with classical and romantic, more than you’d expect by chance.
The rub is that I don’t fully trust that Martindale knew how to know what you’d expect by chance, because he said subjects created an average of 9 groups (p. 253), then used math assuming they had created 3 groups (p. 254). But the error, if there is any, is in the direction of making his results stronger than his analysis indicates. The musical data chosen is peculiar, excluding Beethoven, Brahms, and Wagner from the romantic, but their inclusion would only have made his results stronger.
Chapter 8, "Art and Society", the only chapter in which he adjusts for multiple hypothesis testing, presents some good data indicating that prosperity for the working class correlates with collective thought, cultural references, and a de-emphasis on nature; conservatism correlates with concrete words and references to culture, while liberalism correlates with thought, emotion, and action. The work is interesting, but cast into doubt by the inconsistency between the British and American data.
In Chapter 9, "The Artist and the Work of Art", discussing the common theme of a hero's descent into an underworld, he pioneers the use of word frequency counts to disclose the theme of a story.
We can use coherence of trends [in word usage] to decipher what a narrative is about: that is, if a narrative is about overcoming evil, the trend in evaluative connotation should be stronger than the trend in primordial content. If a narrative is about alteration in consciousness, the reverse should be the case. The Tibetan Book of the Dead, for example, shows a clear trend in primordial content but no trend at all in the use of good versus bad words: it must be about alteration in consciousness rather than good versus evil. This conclusions conforms with what a Tibetan Buddhist would probably tell you. The descent into Hell in book I of Homer's Odyssey is more about good and evil than about alteration in consciousness, though it seems to be about both. In this case, the trend indicates that Hell is a better place than earth, and is consistent with pagan conceptions of the afterlife. ... Moby Dick [has trends in primordial content, but not in good/bad word frequencies, so it] doesn't have much to do with ethics but does seem to symbolize alteration in consciousness.... Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland is an exception: it has no trends at all in either evaluation or primordial content. The story is about something else. (p. 329)
We can use some simple equations to delineate the plots of such narratives.... They can help unlock the hidden or symbolic meaning of a narrative. Narratives have more than one meaning. We do not need to leave it to the whimsy of the reader to decide which interpretation is most important. We can examine the coherence or orderliness of trends in the usage of different types of words to make an objective decision. Book VI of the Aeneid and Coleridge's 'The Rime of the Ancient Mariner' are both about alteration of consciousness and about confronting and overcoming evil. (p. 339)
I think he overstates the strength of conclusions based on word counts, but I admire his vision. He also looks at Dante’s Divine Comedy and other major works. I haven’t seen anyone use word frequency analysis to investigate the themes of different books, or of the different parts of different books. I want to start testing this idea myself.
The Bad
He presents his theory as being about the evolution of music, but didn't understand what evolution is. When he says "evolution", he means its opposite: genetic drift in the absence of selection pressure. He says this is essential: "Evolution" only occurs when art proceeds without any interference from society. He calls selective pressure from society "non-evolutionary pressure" (p. 169). He assumes that whatever aesthetics is, it is not anything that real people like or want; their preferences can only contaminate aesthetic evolution. That’s not just saying artistic quality or popularity isn’t objective; it’s saying, from an “evolutionary” standpoint, that it’s bad. (Again, though, this is a popular position among aesthetic theorists.) He seems to have forgotten that he theorized that arousal potential (AP; see “Ugly details” below) was important only by arguing that it increases hedonic value = aesthetic fitness.
He ought to spend more time explaining what "primordial content" (PC) is, since he spends the entire book measuring it. It comes from psychoanalysis and indicates regression into... something. The subconscious? The collective? The pre-human? His attempted explication (p. 49), equating primordial thought with noticing similarities, and conceptual thought with making distinctions, is just a repetition of a common prejudice against "analytic" science that we have inherited from the Middle Ages and the romantic poets, of scientific thought as only dividing and never synthesizing. It has no real bearing on whatever it is that his construct measures.
So the theoretical underpinnings of his research are shaky. Fortunately he has lots of data. His interpretation of it, though, is usually statistically flawed. On p. 166-167 he describes computing a correlation using 150 samples, and says it results in "a marginally significant correlation of .14 with time.... If we [group datapoints together into 15 groups and use their means], the correlation is much higher--.66--and clearly significant." That shouldn't happen, and if it does, you shouldn't use it. Allowing the experimenter to choose a cluster size that gives him "significance" is cheating. There are problems with many of his claims of significance, particularly the ones that claim periodic oscillations are significant [5]. He tells us that his theory works with Hamlet, Cymbeline, and The Great Railway Bazaar (p. 318), but not how many books it didn't work with. This concealment of his selection process reduces much of his quantitative data to anecdotes.
[5] My guess is that what he means when he says an eyeballed oscillation is significant is that he tried a lot of different polynomials, and eventually found one simple polynomial to fit the main curve, and one higher-degree recurrence relation that fits the oscillation after the first one is subtracted from the data, such that the fit to the oscillation explained {enough of the variance left over after the fit to the main curve} to achieve significance on a t-test. However, this doesn't account for the freedom he had in choosing the type of equation and the parameters for it to fit his data.
The most-common problem is that he would do some experiment rating people or works of art on, say, 20 different dimensions, most of which he didn't specify in this book, and nearly all of which, when revealed, are synonyms for either "primordial content" or "arousal potential" (AP). Then he does data fishing to find the two of the ten million or so possible small subsets of those 20 which have the highest correlation with PC and AP, and if one of those ten million choices correlates better than would happen one time in 20 by chance, he calls it significant.
If you look on page 188, you'll find an experiment with Italian paintings in 20-year periods from 1330-1729. He had subjects rate painters along 24 dimensions, and then do factor analysis. Then he informs us that two of the resulting 5 dimensions corresponded to primordial content and arousal potential. This is better than cherry-picking the subsets that work best for him, but it’s still picking 2 out of 5. (We'd really like to know what the other factors were, and their relative importance, because that would suggest other influences on artistic change, but he doesn't tell us what they were.) When he tells us which dimensions correlated with arousal potential (active, complex, tense, disorderly) and which correlated with primordial content (not photographic, not representative of reality, otherworldly, and unnatural), it becomes clear that most of the first set were designed to measure arousal potential, and the second set are all synonyms for primordial content. So the experiment didn't validate his two dimensions; it just asked people to rate paintings along them, then (surprise) pulled his planted measurements out of the factor analysis.
He's guilty of cherry-picking data. On p.178 you'll find a chart of primordial content in pop music lyrics. He states that "there was a significant increase in primordial content from 1952-53 to 1958-59." But if you start at 1953 instead of 1952, it becomes a decrease; even more so if you end at 1960 or 1961.
He had no conception of degrees of freedom. The section on cross-national synchrony in Chapter 7 is outrageous: He fit equations to explain how trends in one art in one country are influenced by trends in other arts in that country and other countries. But studying the equations on page 242, we realize that each of his fits takes 17 parameters! And in most cases he constructs these to fit fewer than 17 datapoints! I don't know why they don't fit exactly, or how he found his supposedly optimal solutions.
His quest for periodicity used tests that would find periodicity in random walks. Every time he plots a bunch of points and says that the oscillations around a curve are statistically significant, count the number of times that a segment goes through one point before re-crossing the central curve, and the number of times it goes through 2 or more points. If those numbers are roughly equal, it indicates that the oscillation around the central curve is a random walk, and is not statistically significant. (You can prove this using the binomial theorem.) Out of figures 7.5, 9.1, 9.2, 9.4, 9.20, and 9.21, only figures 9.1 and 9.21 pass this simple test. He's generally guilty of optimistic eyeballing of data. He analyzes Dante's Inferno and finds that "the main trend takes the shape of an M with an extra up-flourish at the end" (p. 323) Looking at figure 9.18, it's hard to imagine how any realistic data could look less like his description of it.
The book is full of post-hoc rationalization. (That is, he never predicted a test's outcome; he found the outcome, then justified it, often with some accommodating exceptions). For example, his study of American painters (p. 193-198) finds a single dip-rise in primordial content from 1800 to 1920, and so instead of admitting that he didn’t find dips and rises for the different styles during that time, he designates that entire 120-year period as "American style". By never stating up front what he expects to find, he always interprets his result either as having proven his hypothesis (when they are consistent with it) or having proven something peculiar about the data (when they are not).
Sometimes he claims to have proven both at the same time. On p. 191, he reports finding results for his Italian paintings experiment that match the time periods for the styles late gothic, renaissance-mannerist, baroque, and rococo. But what's "renaissance-mannerist"? It's a mashing together of two periods because the data doesn't come out as it should if they're two separate periods. "If one accepts the idea that primordial content rises once a style is in effect, the present results support the idea that mannerism is the final stage of renaissance style rather than a separate style" (p. 193). Okay, but you can either assume A (mannerism is the final stage of renaissance style) and use it to prove B (that primordial content dips then rises within a style), or you can assume B and use it to prove A. You can't assume both A and B in order to prove B and A simultaneously!
The Ugly Details
Primordial Content
Martindale also thought he'd found the principal component of art, starting from theory rather than from data or observation. This principal component was "primordial content" (PC, p. 57-59), which seems not to mean content that’s primordial = primal (e.g., sex, hunger, pleasure, terror), but content that’s dream-like, hallucinatory, unreal, nonsensical, chaotic, incoherent [1]. Martindale doesn’t get much more specific than that. He justifies this by saying that Nietzsche’s Apollo / Dionysius, Jung’s eros / logos, McKellar’s A / R (?), Berlyne’s autistic / directed, Werner’s dedifferentiated / differentiated (?), and Wundt’s associationistic / intellectual dichotomies, all mean the same thing. “Thought or consciousness varies along one main axis, as is obvious to anyone who studies the topic.” (p. 57)
Not quite. Those are all dichotomies with logic on one side, but they have one of two very different things on the other side: either sensuality, or associationism / dream-logic [2]. I don’t think those things (Dionysian abandon, and drug-induced hallucinations) have anything in common. The former is very agentive; the second is entirely passive. The former leads to Lord Byron, Wagner, the Moulin Rouge, and heavy metal; the latter (I would say, based partly on my own limited experience), to Celtic knotwork, Bach, Salvador Dali, Carlos Castaneda, and electronic / trance music. It became obvious as I read on that Martindale was measuring dream-like content, not sensuousness.
Also, because those other dichotomies oppose logic to something, they’re about processes of thought, while Martindale’s “primordial content” is static. It’s something you can see in a picture, like dark shadows or bat wings, or words you can count in a poem, like “rock”, “flame”, or “kiss”. And he doesn’t oppose primordial content to logic; he opposes it to… less primordial content. That’s not actually a dichotomy; it’s just a category.
But that’s okay. It doesn’t really matter how he came up with the category if he can state clearly what’s in it, and gets strong results from it. He does that [3].
[1] My guess is he was thinking of Freud’s “primary process thought”, and used “primal” in its obsolete sense of “primary”, even though Freud’s “primary process” is neither primal nor primary.
[2] If there is a historic linking of these two kinds of dichotomies, it’s probably through the yin-yang. Women were historically stereotyped as being (a) sensual and (b) illogical. So if your main dichotomy is male / female, and “female” = sensual and illogical, then of course Apollo / Dionysius and directed / autistic mean the same thing.
[3] He built something called the Regressive Imagery Dictionary that’s a big list of PC words, among other things.
I mislead by calling PC the principal component of art. If you had a principal component, you’d explain variation in art in terms of variation of that component. Martindale’s explanation isn’t that simple. It’s complicated and not very compelling. (Don’t worry. Things gets better once he starts experimenting.)
Arousal Potential
"Arousal" is a very general, very vague concept from psychology that’s used to measure the strength of an animal’s response to stimuli. It can mean the number of steps an animal takes per minute, how much time it spends awake, its blood pressure, sexual arousal, or pretty much anything else an experimenter can measure that seems more active than passive.
Like Willie van Peer, Martindale begins by describing the Wundt curve (p. 42):
This curve shows that people get the most enjoyment (“hedonic value”) out of things that produce one particular amount of “arousal”. Play music too quietly, and it’s not very arousing. Play it too loud, and it’s painful. Same thing for other senses.
Also like van Peer, Martindale forgets the shape of the curve immediately after presenting it. He assumes for the rest of the book that artists always seek to increase arousal, although looking at the Wundt curve would suggest instead that they always seek to keep it at its optimal value. He uses the term “arousal potential” (AP), because he’s talking about a property of works of art, not a measured response to them.
Habituation
He doesn’t forget about the curve entirely. He dismisses it by talking about habituation (p. 45). Habituation is a very general behavior, found in humans, mice, snails, and even planaria. It means that an organism responds strongly to (is aroused by) a stimuli the first time, but its response grows weaker with time. So a given type of art should arouse the same person less and less the more they’re exposed to it. This, of course, is why, after reading science fiction books for a few years, people will get tired of them and switch to romance or mystery novels, and why old people can’t stand to listen to the music or re-watch the movies that were popular when they were young, but continually seek out the newest and latest. So this is why artistic styles must change: They produce less arousal over time, and people grow tired of them. The main problem is thus always to produce more arousal, to get back to optimal AP.
Except, wait, humans don’t act that way. Habituation is routinely used in theories of art, but it doesn’t match human behavior at all. Humans do exactly the opposite: They imprint on what they read or listened to as a teenager and generally seek out more of the same for the rest of their lives.
Also, if music entered the classical style around 1750 because people had become habituated to baroque, why don’t we just switch back to baroque now? The idea that we, in the 21st century, know fugues better than Bach did, is ridiculous. The habituation explanation for changing artistic styles requires Lamarckian inheritance of habituation. Martindale takes up this objection, which has been made before, and rejects it with an argument on page 49 that is, frankly, too nonsensical to summarize.
Pure Aesthetics: Content Doesn’t Matter
Martindale began by assuming that artistic change is internally driven by the quest for increasing AP. The only way to increase AP, he believes, is either to increase the primordial content (PC) of art, or to change to a new style. This is so obvious to Martindale that he doesn’t explain why. I think I’ve figured out why: Martindale adhered to a “pure aesthetics” theory of art.
It is not what Gibbon said—it is not meaning—that makes The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire a work of literature. It is how he said what he had to say that makes it literature… In other words, the meaning of a text is not really relevant to literature. (p. 15)
He never considers the possibility that the content of a poem, or a story, or a picture, can be artistically significant. He says the point of all art is its style (p. 71). If someone likes a work of art, any part of that liking that can be explained in terms of, say, their personal experience or morals, must not be aesthetics (p. 169). (Indeed, being likable or not likable is generally not thought by theorists to be properly part of aesthetics--rather odd, considering aesthetics is defined as the study of what people like.)
I would like to be able to say that Art, to him, is whatever is left over after you understand it. The aesthetic value of a piece would then be literally the soul of its appeal, in that it’s a hypothesized essence that can contain only whatever you don’t yet understand. That would mean he was chasing a ghost.
That’s a horrible thing to say, but I can’t be even that generous, because he says what he considers to be the soul of art: Surprise. When he talks about French poetry, it becomes apparent what he thinks art is. Like Apollinaire, he prefers poetry that makes no sense to poetry that does, because poetry that makes no sense is surprising, while poetry that makes sense, isn’t (p. 82-86). It seems that “art” is, to him, approximately synonymous with “shock”. (Unfortunately, I think this may also be a common view now in aesthetic theory.)
For the most part, this doesn’t matter, since he’s working with data rather than armchair philosophizing. His poor understanding of how art operates only becomes a burden when coupled with his weakness for rationalizing away results. (In the section on short stories, he explains away some unexpected results using a very crude model of what a story is; e.g., p. 172, 175, 313.)
But it’s his unspoken justification for assuming that there’s a very simple dynamic underlying all of art, so that taste, artistic merit, or external factors. He doesn’t feel the need to justify his expectation that artistic appeal can be measured by a single number (AP), since he already believes, from his own taste in art, that it is composed of only one factor (surprise), which means about the same thing as “arousal potential”.
Artistic Change is Scalloped
PC, Martindale says, goes down and then up within an artistic style. The more PC a work of art has, the more AP it has. But PC is hard to generate. The artist has to regress (perhaps by becoming alcoholic, acting like a spoiled brat, and/or moving to the Village). So artists generate just as much PC as they need to out-do the artist before them. (A better explanation would be that artists generate just enough additional PC to compensate for the diminution of AP below its optimal level due to habituation, but Martindale has long since forgotten that AP has an optimal level.)
When artists invent a new style, they can slack off on the regression and not generate so much PC, because the new style, and incremental changes to it, provide enough AP to exceed the AP of the previous style. (Similarly, a better explanation would be that they must include less PC, to avoid producing art with too much AP.)
Once the new style has completely replaced the old and has been completely developed, PC must increase to keep increasing AP. Eventually an artist’s work degenerates progresses to complete incoherence, or his liver gives out, and he can only increase AP by switching to another new style.
So you expect a plot of PC over time to go up and down, and each local minimum of the graph should be the midpoint of one artistic style. And this is what we see, sort of, in this plot on page 231 of PC in European music from 1500 to 1900:
Here we see the main problem with Martindale’s work: It involves a lot of staring at graphs and wishful thinking. Yes, there are curves going up and down. But how could there not be? Are these curves any different than we’d see if we plotted a random number from a normal distribution for each point?
If a point goes on a random walk, at each step it has a .5 chance of changing direction. So if you cut a random-walk’s graph into pieces at every local maximum or minimum, half of the pieces should have 2 points, ¼ should have 3 points, ⅛ should have 4 points, and so on. If the walk isn’t random, but instead you plot points from a normal distribution, then there should be fewer long runs; reversion to the mean should be more common. Pieces with 2 and 3 points should be more common, and pieces of 4 and 5 should be less common. I’m too lazy and stupid to figure it out, so I wrote a program to brute-force it. Let’s check:
Pieces 2 3 4 5
Italy: 15 11 3 1 0
France: 10 4 3 2 1
Britain: 12 5 6 1 0
Germany: 13 5 7 0 0
_____________________________
Total: 50 25 19 4 1
RWalk: 50 25 12.5 6.2 3
Normal: 50 31 14 4 1
"RWalk" are the numbers we'd see in a random walk. "Normal" are the most-likely numbers we'd see if the plots were from a random number generator with a normal distribution. I’m not impressed.
And, yes, we see that the labels for the periods B1, B2, etc., seem to come at the beginning of a decline in PC. But the declines didn’t come where those labels were; Martindale put the labels where he saw the declines. I know this because they’re in a different position for each graph (France, Britain, Germany). The standard division is as follows: Baroque 1600-1750; Classical 1750-1800; Romantic 1800-1900 [4].
Wikipedia divides Baroque music into Early, High, and Late. Martindale has only Early and Late Baroque. Hmm. On the German graph, which is the most-important one for this period of music [6], the labels B1 and B2 appear after points 4 and 8, which would locate them at the years 1570 and 1650. Interpolating between his points, Martindale locates the start of the Early Baroque around 1555, and the end of the Late Baroque around 1695. His entire “Baroque” is shifted 50 years too early. It would be more accurate to call the dip labelled “C” on his graph (1700-1760) “Late Baroque” instead of “Classical”. And if you check the other graphs, they’re even worse: he has the Baroque in France as 1520 to 1680!
[4] Wikipedia approaches it differently; it gives overlapping periods of 1580-1760, 1730-1820, 1780-1910, and 1890-1975. Averaging the endpoints gives the same results.
His graph begins the “Early Romantic” in 1760, 40 years too soon, and ends the “Late Romantic” in 1880. Wikipedia lists a single Romantic era. Throughout the book, Martindale divides recognized eras into as many styles as his graphs seem to say they have, rather than stating up-front how many different styles he expects to find. So, again, what would the data have had to look like for Martindale to say it didn’t confirm his theory? Pretty strange, I think.
Implications
Suppose Martindale’s thesis about artistic change were correct. What would that mean?
Well, it would at least mean that all of the essays and manifestos by all artists of all time were meaningless twaddle. Artists creating new styles are sometimes quite vocal about why they’re doing it, like the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood painters, realist novelists, existentialist playwrights, and modernist poets. When they’re not, critics will often jump into the gap and explicate their work for them. All of those explanations are incompatible with Martindale’s. He says that a new style is good if, and only if, it is strange. No amount of theory matters. The theories all offer only false justifications for new strange things. At best, they're rationalizations artists must make to themselves to produce something new and strange.
It also leaves no role for quality, content, or even skill. I’d like “arousal potential” to include these, but Martindale has been explicit throughout that it does not--it only includes depth of regression (primordial content), and degree of surprise. He maintains this even when it’s patently absurd, as on page 313, when he says, “A writer must … either increase depth of regression or change styles in order to increase incongruity, complexity, and the other devices that constitute arousal potential … in an individual work of literature.” In other words, action, plot, suspense, surprising events, engaging characters, and even steamy sex are all incapable of increasing arousal potential, and so have little or no bearing on the artistic fitness of a book. Logically, I would conclude from this that the best thing I could do to my stories to make them more popular would be to use bad grammar, or no grammar at all, to increase their incongruity and "complexity".
Taken as an absolute, his thesis is simply wrong--there is more to art than incongruity. But if even a quarter of his tests held up under appropriate statistical techniques, it would indicate that the judgements of posterity, on who were great artists and what was great art, have very little to do with skill, quality, or anything other than novelty. It would mean that we don't know how to art. I'll have more to say about this after I review Pitirim Sorokin's Social & Cultural Dynamics.
Even if Martindale's thesis is entirely wrong, it's still valuable as an insight into the horrible implications of Ezra Pound’s “make it new!” Martindale’s book drives home, page after page, graph after relentless graph, a totalistic vision of art as lust for novelty. That Martindale can be so conversant with these many types of art, and value them only for their incongruity, proves that humans can theorize themselves into a numbness to art. Or, worse, that there are people who have no other aesthetics. (This would explain Axe Cop and a lot of Random fics.) That this vision of art is so compatible with 20th century ideas about art is a warning sign about the latter.
Conclusion
I like Martindale’s approach very much. He gathered a lot of data, framed a lot of hypotheses, and did a lot of tests, in many different art forms, covering the past 700 years. He just screwed up almost all of his analyses. His analysis is plagued by a failure to account for multiple hypothesis testing, a crippling failure to account for degrees of freedom, confusion of statistical significance with significance, and post-hoc rationalization. So most of his conclusions are at best suggestive, and at worst bogus.
But his experiments could have been analyzed correctly. He showed us many creative ways to experiment quantitatively on art. He just didn't get the logic and math right.
And he did several important experiments correctly, providing strong evidence for some interesting, contentious, and broadly-applicable theories about art. But if you haven't got a strong background in math, you'll never be able to tell which of his experiments are the pearls among the rubbish.
Interesting question: What does happen when someone from the humanities comes wildly charging into the sciences?
I'd argue Asimov and Clarke at best, and Hubbard at worst.
Actually, artists -- which is to say, those who draw and paint -- have been known to dabble in the sciences from time to time. There's some absolutely astounding theory that goes into dimensions, scaling, forced perspective...
Actually, actually, I suppose that makes Disneyland and especially the Epcot Center a huge example. Disney Imagineers are quite possibly the most extreme example, and their work is phenomenal. Like, take Main Street for example: It's built to look bigger as you walk into the park, so it looks like it stretches on forever, but smaller as you leave, so the exit appears much closer than it really is. There's also the work that went into the automatonic Hall of Presidents, the Epcot Center, the- I could go on.
3612432
The reverse is also true. An acquaintance of mine who worked on the Human Genome Project and helped create the modern discipline of bioinformatics is also a very avid amateur painter and sculptor.
3612432 Well, Asimov was a chemist first. I wouldn't call him "from" either side, really. More of a Renaissance man. Clarke was a radar specialist before he sold a story. They both grew up in science fiction fandom and steeped in science and technology.
3612432 Disney had/has some of the most amazing creative people work on their parks, from awesome concepts that should be absolutely impossible, to actual physical end results that boggle the mind. (I'm a Disney gadget geek fan)
Outside of Disney, we have an endless array of special effects people who not only dream up aliens, but stuff the figures full of wires and gadgets to the point where they become real, while walking across matte paintings of alien worlds and futuristic spacecraft ad infinitum... I get so jealous at times.
Ahem. The article. Yes. First, I would like to thank Bad Horse for his hard work that shows his talent at making very complicated topics understandable for those of us who can barely do averages, let alone attempt advanced stats like these. Seriously, it's a gift. From the article, Colin Martindale had a very ingenious way of looking at his subject matter that shows a great understanding of it and a desire to categorize, but that his attempts to justify his conclusions were flawed deeply. I would suppose a great number of the harder-science subjects would suffer from this also, although to a lesser extent due to the technical skills of those writer's peers. This is a special bridge between science and art where the numbers take on a life of their own, particularly in an area where whatever statistics you generate are almost never exactly replicable, and therefore extremely tempting to fudge when they don't line up just exactly where you want them. (And I'll stop there before I start ranting about weather)
Is there evidence for this or are you just being dismissive?
Problems like this don't require an advanced degree to spot:
That was interesting. It is cool that he tried; it is too bad that he failed to actually apply proper scientific and statistical rigor.
I think that his central thesis is an interesting one, though, and I suspect that this:
Is not wrong. Novelty is a hugely important factor in enjoying many works, and I've seen time and again on FIMFiction things which were rather sloppy executions of things which were not at all novel, but which were largely novel to the audience, being highly praised. Heck, I may have taken advantage of this a time or two myself.
I've seen similar trends elsewhere; in video games, many independent games seem to trade on novelty over any other trait, including actually being all that fun to play. And indeed, one could perhaps argue that the popularity of My Little Pony may have been in part driven by the same thing; a show about an interesting, engaging female cast with a cute aesthetic may well have driven many people to adopt the show initially and brought it to a much wider audience, with its countercultural values of niceness and friendship powering through skepticism.
3612614
Yeah, well, novelty's easy. Well-executed novelty, though, requires a bit more effort. (Though I guess you can argue that works like Axe Cop are exceptional in how they can continuously keep being novel, at the expense of pretty much anything else.)
I think people get fixated on novelty ideas because they're the gateway to interesting and unexpected experiences. Even when the possibilities of the idea itself are the only virtue of a creative work.
Good intentions, good approach. If only he'd known what he was doing. Seeing an artistic theorist and a statistician collaborate on something would be fascinating, assuming the two of them could ever agree on what to analyze.
Also, did he really conflate the Greek afterlife with the Christian Hell? Wow.
If you're somewhat math inclined, you might like Godel, Escher, Bach. It's a really interesting bridging of mathematics and art, with an emphasis on loops, recursive patterns, and paradoxes.
It's more a math book than anything, though.
3612825
No, but he saw descent into Hell and into the underworld as both symbolizing regression.
3613467 A lot of people have mentioned it to me, but it's so darn fat.
3612614
There are 2 kinds of success in independent games. One is "normal" success, like Angry Birds, 2048, Kingdom of Loathing, or Slenderman, where lots of people play the game. The other is critical success, which means they won an award at the IGF. To win an award at the IGF, a game has to impress the judges for, I dunno, about one minute. If you read an article about independent games, they usually talk about games that won awards, not Angry Birds.
Incidentally, winning research grants is more like winning at the IGF than like normal success. MIT gets more grant money than any other university in the world, and the Media Lab gets something like, I dunno, 20 times as many grant dollars per student as even elite universities. This is because they prioritize creating a cool 3D computer-graphics or live interactive demo above all else. The purpose of each Media Lab research project is to create a demo cool enough to get another grant.
3612552
Other critics don't use statistics, so I assume they don't understand statistics. The prior odds of a literature professor having expertise in statistics are low.
True, but it's only a problem with his theoretical motivation for his approach. It doesn't invalidate any of his experiments.
3613899
To be fair, I'm not sure that a consumer-oriented press would want to spend all that much time talking about games like Angry Birds. If you're talking about internal industry stuff, sure, but most of the video game press is consumer-oriented. Is reading about Angry Birds likely to be all that entertaining to the masses? Are most people going to want to read about it? Heck, do the video game journalists have anything worthwhile to say about Angry Birds in the first place? Most of them aren't experts, after all, and thus have very little idea of what makes for a good game.
I think that novelty games get talked about by the video game press for several reasons. For one thing, the more you're exposed to video games, the more some random novelty item might pop out at you. If you mostly only spend a tiny amount of time with any given game, then any novelty game will stick with you better than "decent platformer #256".
From a pradctical standpoint, novelty games also gives you more to talk about - a nearly-unknown game which has some clever thing in it is going to be novel to more of your readers than Call of Duty is. Extra Credits acknowledges this in its "games you might not have played" segments, which are often about games which contain some interesting gimmick than games which are actively good, because the gimmick is something interesting, even though the game itself may be (and often is) crap.
I think another reason is general pretentiousness mixed with incompetence. The worst part of the gaming press is composed of deeply insecure people who need to justify themselves as real critics, and thus pretend like video games are something they're not. Many of them are non-experts who basically became video game journalists by doing it, but they have no real special expertise in video games, and thus don't really have much of value to say about them - they don't understand video game design, nor do they really understand what makes for a good or bad game or good or bad design. They want video games to be art, which they perceive as highly subjective (meaning that they can't be wrong) as well as being Important, and their background is not in analytical thinking. Thus, a game which has novelty or artistic value and little else appeals to them because it reinforces their preconceptions of importance and their notion of video games being TRUE ART.
I think the final reason is simply that it is easier to find a crappy novelty game than it is an actually good indie game, as they don't come out that often.
Games like Bastion, Transistor, Shovel Knight, To The Moon, and the like got a lot of press for the actual reason why lots of people liked them (and lots of people did like those games). They weren't the best games ever, but they got a lot of positive press because they were good at delivering the experiences they were trying to deliver - Shovel Knight was basically a modern NES game which hit all the nostalgia buttons while showing solid game design, To The Moon was basically a book in game form (and as a game, it wasn't very good, but it was meant to attract via the story - there wasn't any "real" gameplay in it that I recall), Transistor possessed an aesthetic that was very attractive to people along with decent, reasonably novel gameplay, and Bastion made clever use of a semi-interactive narrator and combined it with solid gameplay and a solid story and world aesthetic to create something that a lot of people loved.
And it isn't like Minecraft doesn't still get tons of press.
The video game press often talks up crappy indie games with no real value, but I suspect there are a variety of factors which goes into that, and not all of it is just the novelty value.
That's sad on many levels, but probably predictable, given the nature of the process. The only real way to fight back against such meta-strategies is to fix your committee, which most politicians probably can't do because they're incapable of understanding the problem.
From the title, I imagined your muse sashaying in wearing a bowler hat and white jumpsuit to invite you out for a bit of the old ultra-violence.
3614013
If you had said "Expertise", I wouldn't have debated it. But you said "even less understanding than this guy who screwed his statistics up", which is less certain, though entirely possible.
Now this is the quality content i expect from my smol hoers werds site. But seriously Bad Horse, I more than see what you mean about your blogs taking literal dozens of hours of research. I still think it's such a gas that i'm reading this advance aesthetics theory stuff on a my little pony fanfiction website. To be honest, I feel like you should try to get this published in a magazine somewhere. thanks for doing what you do! <33
3612547
This definitely piques my interest! I LOVE Disney! ... albeit, in the sense of the creative folks they acquired. Do you have any sites or literature to offer an amateur enthusiast regarding the design of such complex attractions? I'd love to learn more.
---
This is all quite fascinating, albeit a bit confusing for the sake of arguments losing merit for misused data, then heartily dissected by others with a learned opinion regarding such.
My ignorant observation has been that history offers a fairly excusable reason for certain art forms to persist. The worth and impact of any art piece is eventually determined by those who place a value upon such, be it for monetary, political or religious gain. Or all three?
I wonder at how many artistic changes were possibly squashed, being deemed heretical, during our time as a bonafide society? I suspect more than I could fathom. Individual perceptions, given a chance to display their deepest expressions in an emotional artistic manner, all for existing during a measure of evolved thought; personal experiences of innocence or hatred, made to gain or alienate supporters, decided by no factions save their own?
Am I even on the same train of thought anymore? I don't know.
Still, all in all a very provocative piece. Thank you, Bad Horse.
What a weird setup and weird argument. Why does he think self-harm should have anything to do with hate in another species? Isn't it the opposite with our species? People [like to imagine that they] are more likely to self-sacrifice when protecting someone they love.
What a post! In some fields, an analysis like this (but 10 times longer) will earn you a PhD.
3613887
I can't believe you haven't read GEB. I suspect you'll either love it or hate it. Possibly both.
bartneck.de/publications/2008/designingForExperienceBoredom/figures/figure01.jpg
Fig. 3-37: Twilight Sparkle attempts to understand Cadenza MiAmore's field of specialization
3615218 Not self-harm; harm of the person you hate. Quine didn't use that example. His famous example is about rabbits, and ends up considering that when someone else says "rabbit", he might be a Heraclitian who uses "rabbit" as basically a gerund, an event: "there is a rabbit over there" = "there is rabbitting happening over there". I thought my example was more clear.
3615171
Many, but I'd bet teaching people to believe certain things and think in certain ways prevents more change just by preventing people from even wanting to try something different.
While you make an impressive case for Martindale's research being shoddy, I'm going to offer a limited defense of this bit right here.
During the New Hollywood era, in the late '60s and '70s, there was a lot of high-profile experimental stuff being done in the film world; lots of raw, cynical, art-y films like Taxi Driver and Serpico made by genuine talents. Those weren't the outliers, they were the paradigm of '70s film. But the one-two punch of Star Wars creating the blockbuster movie and massive flops like One From the Heart and Heaven's Gate bankrupting independent studios, film was basically snatched up by conglomerates looking for profit. The modern, franchise-oriented movie landscape was born in the Reagonomics-fueled crucible of the '80s -- not to mention other aspects of the now-omnipresent entertainment industry like Marvel Comics, which was for a time owned by goddamn Revlon Cosmetics.
But it wasn't all because of the conglomerations. They were the panderers, and the American public wanted what they were pandering. With Vietnam and Watergate and the Democratic National Convention riots going on, the United States was a fractured society. The films its artists made reflected that: unpolished downer films about police corruption and violent urban life and high-profile porno made for Times Square struck a chord in a disenchanted, nihilistic populace. But, like all social movements, it birthed its replacement, and as the '70s drew to a close the radical evangelism of Reagan and the Religious Right rose to supplant it. The simplistic fantasy of Star Wars, while just as anti-Nixonian as films like Three Days of the Condor but draped in a simplistic and positive good-vs-evil morality, was far more reassuring and palatable to audiences in the dawning Reagan era hungry for brightness and positivity.
(Perhaps you, reader, are now saying, "But Empire was a lot darker then Star Wars!", you're right. And people hated Empire for being too dark when it came out. It was only later, around the time Reagonomics began burning out and Watchmen and The Dark Knight Returns revolutionized comics that Empire emerged as the indisputably best Star Wars film.)
Fittingly for the facade of optimism and opportunity Reagan represented, the American public had had enough of seeing reality in their films, of being challenged by celluloid and artistic intent. They chose unreal simulacrum instead, and it's tough to deny the arrested development and nostalgia-addiction of people weaned on '80s pop culture is a direct result of that. Or, for that matter, the American fondness for Disneyland, a magical world full of marvels draped in Leave It To Beaver-esque visions of wholesome, optimistic Americana, where the magic lasts as long as the cash in your wallet does.
Long story short, artistic changes are intimately tied to the national psyche. If the masses are disillusioned with the government and the imperial presidency, then the artists are given free reign to make dark, challenging art without the need for mass success. But when the national sentiment tires of that and shifts to mass consumerism cloaked in a veneer of optimism and idealism, then the quality and quantity of art that society produces shifts likewise.
If there is a dichotomy at work here, it's the one the artists themselves have been telling us about for the past hundred years: the artist versus the dollar sign. Artists do enjoy challenging themselves and coming up with new and arousing art. Whether it'll sell is another question entirely, depending entirely on how the financial winds are blowing, and it's a question some artists can't afford to ignore. (Francis Ford Coppola famously stated his entire body of work in the '80s and '90s was an attempt to pay off his debts from One From the Heart.)
Just at a glance, I'd say the bigger problem is that he's conflating different eras with wildly different methods of transmitting art. In the pre-modern era, a handful of composers would be commissioned, more often than not by wealthy aristocratic patrons, to construct art according to specifications like a carpenter makes a house. Are we really to believe that's a comparable milieu to the modern mass media landscape?
Now I feel almost guilty for the Patreon support, because this is not $60 per 10K words sort of writing. This is ... geez, ballparking the amount of research time and knowledge accumulation that went into this, we're probably underpaying you by about 1.5 orders of magnitude.
I'd echo 3614958 and tell you to get this into a journal, except then you will have fought for so long against monsters that you will have become a monster yourself.
3616149
I don't like to call it shoddy. It's wrong in a field where most people are not even wrong. Statistics are tricky.
Re. the changing American public, he's not interested in that kind of change. I don't think any of his data goes past 1930. A lot of it is poetry and short stories, because they're not profitable. He thinks letting the public express its preferences slows down artistic change.
I think it's questionable whether the taste of the 20th century public was any more crass or kitsch or whatever your favorite insulting term is than the taste of 16th century nobility, but you gotta use some data.
Note that change is not monotonically to make art more dominated by money. Short stories and poetry have both become less and less profitable over the past 150 years.
3615734
I thought it might be that, but that requires a lot more assumptions. If the relationship between words is not axiomatized, then conclusion becomes less reliable as you get farther from the premise. An experiment involving only self-harm when the premise is based on self-harm is much more indicative than an experiment involving harm-in-others when the premise is based on self-harm.
The whole setup is strange though. Think about what it takes for the initial conditions to make sense. The experimenter has already distinguished love and hate from other lexemes based on their usage, and the distinction between the two requires some extra information. It has already assumed that lexemes related to love and hate mirror each other, and that they differ only in chirality. It then assumes that chirality can be inferred by relation to pain to conclude that love and hate can be distinguished from each other. The argument doesn't conclude anything that isn't assumed. *
Martindale's experiments, even the variants done with children, test for both structure and grounding without trying to separate the influences of the two. To determine the influence of grounding, I think you'd have to subtract out the influence of cross-lexeme relationships. For example, ask subjects to write about paintings, music, and so on and also ask subjects to group the same artworks by similarity. Then take groups of text that are very dissimilar from one another and see how correctly they were categorized.
This whole idea is fascinating though. It's reminiscent of Shannon's own experiments on language.
* There's one other thing off about it, though this one is specific to the alien communication example and has nothing to do with Martindale's intentions. It assumes a smooth translation from reactions in an individual to meaning conveyed by that individual. In practice, there is no individual, and the results can vary drastically depending on what it is that's measured. If I'm picking my nose, the skin cells in my nose presumably experience extreme negative valence. I, on the other hand, experience mild positive valance. Onlookers experience mild negative valence. In a human, we usually have the convenience that the thing that directs speech (and some of the other forms of human communication) happens to consistently be the thing that feels**. How much do you have to assume to say something remotely similar about an individual of an alien species?
** This is usually true for me, at least. It may not be usually true for people with a split brain.
3616149 BTW, the relevance of habituation to changing public taste depends on whether changing public taste is caused mostly by changing individual tastes, or by individuals with constant tastes entering & leaving the population. I don't know which factor is more important.
3616844
There's no self-harm involved anywhere.
I don't see what you're saying. The argument (I think you mean my argument, not the structuralist argument) concludes that we can infer which word means "hate" by saying that "A hates B" is the relationship in which A wishes to cause harm to B. It never assumed that one word or the other meant hate. Assuming that pain is associated with hate is not assuming the conclusion.
I don't recall him phrasing it in terms of structuralism vs. grounding, or mentioning structuralism at all. Did you also read the book?
The alien communication example is my own.
You mean meaning conveyed to that individual? Experienced by? The individual isn't necessarily talking to anybody when he's harmed, so he's not conveying information.
I said "aliens", which defaults to imply individuals. We can imagine other types of aliens which aren't separable into individuals, but I'm obviously not doing that. The ordinary definiteness of individualities that humans have suffices. The post-modernist argument being addressed does not hinge on the alternative possible biology of aliens beyond us not knowing how to map their physical actions and expressions into feelings the way we do for other humans.
Human language expresses the valence of the human, not of its skin cells.
3616928
By "self-harm" I meant "a thing hurts the subject". Not that the subject is harming itself. I was trying to make your wording more compact, though it seems I changed the meaning in the process.
Here's a rephrasing of the part where you quoted me:
My mistake. I thought your conclusion was (a) that the distinction between love and hate goes from nonexistent to existent when you add your grounding assumption. When I said "The argument doesn't conclude anything that isn't assumed," I meant that it was very precisely set up to conclude (a).
I'm reading parts of the book. He doesn't mention it explicitly, but he heavily suggests it. I thought the purpose of your argument was to augment what Martindale said and to provide justification for his beliefs.
EDIT: I've haven't read the second half of your post yet. I blame stealth edits.
EDIT2: The second half is addressed in my next post.
3616928
I mean meaning conveyed by the individual. It doesn't matter to me if the conveyance is active or some passively generated observable, like dopamine levels.
The exact meaning of "individual" doesn't matter. I meant to suggest that "communication with an individual" or "observation of an individual" was ill-defined even for humanoid aliens.
Human language may be used to express the valence of the speaker, but that is not all it gets used for. People talk to themselves in their own heads using human language, and sometimes that speech doesn't relay the valence of the decision maker. Sometimes it relays the valence of some imaginary person. Sometimes people relay the imagined valence of a group of others rather than that of the speaker. In all of these cases, the thing that's actually, physically speaking is just a proxy, or an aggregator of valences.
I'm sure it's possible to come up with some reasonable translation of words. My only point was that "individuals" are not directly observed and that there are a lot of expected edge cases. Similarly, it's very easy to come to contradictory conclusions by varying the scope of what's observed. I wouldn't have raised the point if I thought the edge cases were uncommon in humans.
EDIT: I had this as a footnote because I thought it wasn't relevant to Martindale's experiments. I did think it was relevant to your argument, but I thought your argument was something different when I made my first post.
3616838
Yeah, that's why I qualified it as a limited defense.
Though you mentioned his research into pop music, so I figured the '50s and '60s would be in the upper range of his data.
This is really down to the distinction between the artist as craftsman (the actual etymology of the word "artist") working for commission and the artist as aesthetic wizard and wonderworker driven by passion. And there's no easy dividing line between the two; artists can be different things at different times (cf. my Coppola quote). The people who write poetry and short stories today might write beautiful art, but their popular impact is negligible, just as there are still jazz swing bands making music for the love of jazz swing, despite jazz swing being long past its popular prime.
You're right, change does not always tend towards making art more dominated by money. However, money does dominate which changes in art are lucrative and, therefore, increases their staying power and draws more money-oriented artists to work in that style.
3617453
Oh, yeah. There is that.
3617453
Well, that's why I write about ponies, after all.
Though I'm beginning to think I may have been misinformed.
3617088 Oops; when I said, "It never assumed that one word or the other meant hate," I meant, it assumed one of them did and one did not, but didn't assume which one did.
I'm still confused. I believe you mean that my argument is circular, but I don't see the circle.
Art is revolution. Makes sense.
3617997
You're confused because I can't use words. When I say that "the argument doesn't conclude anything that isn't assumed", I mean your argument is correct because of the definitions you've assigned to terms. It's not going to make sense unless I write out what I'm thinking and what I think you're thinking in a way that you can map from one to the other.
When you refer to "your argument", you're referring to this.
<setup>
Let's say observer is the person trying to determine the meanings of "mikto" and "klaanbart". The first assumption is that observer knows that there is a one-to-one mapping from {mikto, klaanbart} to {love, hate}.
(1) Premise: observer is able to select {lexeme-for-love, lexeme-for-hate} from the set of all lexemes in both the human language and the alien language.
observer isn't not relying on any ground truth at this point, and so observer is able to get to this point using structural queues alone.
(2) Premise: lexeme-for-love and lexeme-for-hate can be identified using information derived from relationships to other words.
At the same time, observer cannot determine the mapping without some extra information.
(3) Premise: lexeme-for-love and lexeme-for-hate cannot be mapped using structural queues alone.
observer would be able to determine the mapping if observer could also observe the valence emotions.
(4) Premise: If observer could observe valence emotions in addition to structural queues, then observer can determine the mapping for lexeme-for-love and lexeme-for-hate.
(5) By (3) and (4), it is not possible to map the lexemes using structural queues alone, but it is possible using structural queues plus the ability to observe valence emotions.
</setup>
<supposition>
We assume that observer can use reaction to pain as an indicator of valence emotion.
(6) Suppose observer can identify universally evolved reactions.
(7) Suppose pain is a universally evolved reaction.
(8) Suppose if observer can observe pain, then observer can observe valence emotion.
</supposition>
<conclusion>
(9) By (6) and (7), observer can observe pain.
(10) By (8) and (9), observer can observe valence emotion.
(11) By (4) and (10), observer can determine the mapping for lexeme-for-love and lexeme-for-hate.
(12) By (3) and (11), it is not possible to map the lexemes using structural queues alone, but it is possible using structural queues plus (6), (7), and (8).
</conclusion>
The way you've written your argument, it looks like a straight modus ponens to the conclusion. I've added (5) only to make the next part easier to understand. Look at the relationship between (5) and (12).
When I refer to "your argument", I'm referring to this:
<setup>
(a) There are two concepts that can each be represented by a separate vector <x, y, z, ...>. Let's call these concepts love and hate.
(b) Love and hate are alike in all vector components except one. For that one component, love and hate have the negated value of the other. Let's call that component emotional valence. (I know in your actual example it only relates to emotional valence, but it shouldn't make a difference here. The concepts could also differ by more than one component, but that also doesn't matter.)
<implicit>
(c) There is one component that is constant for all concepts used by the alien species. The value of that component determines whether positive emotional valence refers to pain or pleasure. Let's call that component chirality. It is impossible to interpret emotional valence without knowing the value of chirality.
(d) Because chirality is constant for all concepts used by the alien species, it is impossible to determine chirality using only relationships between concepts.
</implicit>
(e) Without knowing chirality, it is impossible to determine which component is love and which is hate because the one component that differs between them cannot be interpreted
</setup>
<conclusion>
(f) Suppose a grounding assumption: that pain is the universal aversion to harm. Using pain, we can interpret the value of emotional valence for some concept and therefore determine the value of chirality.
(g) Using a grounding assumption, it is possible to determine something that cannot be determined using only relationships between concepts.
</conclusion>
The way I've written your argument, it looks contrived because (c) and (d) almost exactly state what you're trying to conclude.
From my perspective, the conclusion is only possible because of the way you've defined love and hate through (a), (b), and (e). I think it's difficult to see because your definitions of love and hate are dependent on the definition of chirality in (c) and (d), which was not explicitly stated in your argument. I think the implicit definition of chirality is necessary for your definitions of love and hate to make sense. The definition and interpretation of chirality state almost exactly what you're trying to say about structuralism and grounding assumptions. This is why I say "the argument doesn't conclude anything that isn't assumed".
3621558 'chirality' isn't defined; you have defined it as a label that gives the answer to the problem. I don't know what the questionable part is supposed to be about (b) and (c). I can easily imagine aliens that don't have such concepts of love and hate, but remember we're not talking about general aliens. We're trying to posit humans that are sufficiently strange to us that we can't recognize their emotional responses. So 'love' and 'hate' are just the common human emotions.
No; the point is that you don't have to observe pain. You have to be able to observe harm. 'Harm' is a physical concept that can be inferred from physical observations. So the emotions that one of these aliens displays on being burned, or crushed, or otherwise abused, can be assumed to be more pain-like than joy-like.
3624585
The questionable parts are (c) and (d),
That's exactly my problem with it. It's defined as the thing that introduces uncertainty, which the rest of the argument is set up to solve. It's a completely artificial concept, but it seems necessary for your setup of "love" and "hate" to make sense.
My bad. I would update my previous post, but I'm fairly certain that anyone reading it will read your comment as well.
EDIT: I realize that you might have meant "it isn't defined" in the sense that Russel's paradoxical set "isn't defined". Chirality is just another way to measure concepts. It's a scalar or finite-dimensional vector observable just like any of the other components. This one happens to be an observable of emotional valance. My problem with chirality is not that it's unconstructible. Chirality is constructible. It can be defined in terms of some other components plus some pleasure-pain axis, and the other components don't have to be defined in terms of chirality.
(c) and (d) are flatly wrong except in very specific, very unlikely circumstances. They just seem like bad assumptions to me. It's equivalent to saying that concepts around pleasure and pain are expected (in the statistical sense) to develop equivalently. You are right that this is perfectly fine if we're looking at specific aliens. I thought you were trying to say something more general though.
Yes, I do find it strange that thesaurus.com lists a similar number of synonyms for both "pleasure" and "pain".
3626197 (c) can't be wrong because it's not a claim. It's a label. Calling (c) wrong is like looking at the statement "Let x be the velocity of a swallow" and saying "But x is wrong."
If (d) were flatly wrong, we wouldn't be discussing the matter. The post-modernists have posited (d), and I'm agreeing with them on that point for the moment, and arguing that even given (d), you can discern pain from pleasure and love from hate based on the universal rule that organismal harm is selected against.
We are looking at very specific aliens, but pleasure and pain are universals. Look at all the phlya on Earth. Everything that can move, moves away from things that harm it and towards things that nourish it, even plants and bacteria.
3626880
I have nothing against the notion that evolved species may be overwhelmingly likely to react in certain ways to certain stimuli, and that this would provide a useful means of translating concepts.
Maybe think about it this way. There is an observer that is trying to determine the mapping from {mikto, klaanbart} to {love, hate}. If the observer can infer one bit more information on the mapping than he is able to obtain under your setup, then he would be able to say what the mapping is. If the observer has one bit less information, then knowing the mapping for {pain, no pain} would not be sufficient for creating the {love, hate} mapping. The argument only works when the observer has almost exactly as much information as he is given by the setup. It's not a "stable" argument in the sense that adding a small amount of noise to the initial conditions would invalidate the conclusion.
There are two ways to resolve this. The first is to assume that the observer can infer more information than is provided by your setup. In this case the observer is no better off with universal observables than without. The observer can already determine the {love, hate} mapping without universal observables. S is no stronger than G in this case. I don't know how the observer is isolating love and hate from all other lexemes in your setup, so I can't say exactly how this would be done.
The second is to assume that the observer can infer less information than is provided by the setup. In this case, the observer needs to identify more universal observables before being able to determine the mapping for {love, hate}. If you want to go for a general argument under this setup, you'd need a way to generate a large number of independent universal observables.
Alternatively, you can change the conclusion. Even with just a single universal observable, you have enough to say that universals can be useful for translating concepts. Meaning doesn't go from indeterminate to determinate, but it does go from indeterminate to less indeterminate.
3628135 You're right that it would be better to use an information-theoretic approach, but I was trying to present Quine's argument. If Quine had understood information theory and had data on the English language, he wouldn't have made that argument. It's provably false, given the "language as a logic" approach.
3630405
There should be some common shorthand to indicate that I agree and that I don't think there's anything left to synchronize on. I'll repurpose an upvote for that. We're probably the only ones left in this comment thread, so it should be unambiguous.
3631863 If we're the only ones left in this thread, and you aren't in the write-off, then where did this come from?
I recall many years ago hearing there was a left/right asymmetry in one kind of physics experiment, but I don't know if that still stands. Google finds this.
Under Asymmetry, Wikipedia says:
That last statement is incorrect, but it may be that the observed violations were judged erroneous. Sounds like Twilight's problem is theoretically solvable, since she and the other creature are moving the same direction in time.
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I don't know who wrote it. It's strange since the only people I know that use the word "chirality" are those that have been introduced to the concept of CP-symmetry violation. The only candidate I know that would write something like that is Jaxie. He's also the only one I know that might convincingly argue that a time-forward character could plausibly communicate with a time-backward character. He also likes time shenanigans. If I had to bet, I'd bet it was him.
To my knowledge, he doesn't follow your blog though. He might have been tipped off by TD or Pav, but I think it's more likely that he picked that topic by chance.
3632521
GAPJaxie isn't in the writeoff either.
That said, in the story, it is pretty clear they're travelling in the same direction in time, given that they are, you know, communicating over time.