> If all art suddenly disappeared it wouldnt really matter.

Ugh. This is so arrogant.

Take a step back, talk to some people outside this bubble, of different ages, from different parts of the world, and not just on the internet. Get a sense for how they want to live their lives, for what's important to them. Then come back to this opinion you hold so strongly and question it honestly.

What bubble? Please do tell. I hope you're not arrogantly making assumptions about me.

If all art disappeared, sure almost everyone on the planet would be initially upset and unhappy about it. But we'd just continue to make more, humans make art compulsively and instinctively. Eg. In archaeology the signs of art are often equated with the presence of modern humans. Scientific discovery on the other hand does not come naturally, one must subvert ones natural common sense and intuition and use tools like math and the scientific method. Every discovery is hard fought. Also art has no endgame, with enough science and technology we could create AI, the technological singularity, explore the galaxy, achieve literal immortality. With the best art and the happiest people it would all still certainly be erased by the sun going nova, or even just by a medium sized asteroid.

ps. Heres another one..What if all art more than 50 years old disappeared? Most people mightnt even care or notice.

> Also art has no endgame, with enough science and technology we could create AI, the technological singularity, explore the galaxy, achieve literal immortality.

It sounds like in your scenario art is the endgame. What else will we do with our immortal selves once we've reached technological singularity?

Yeah, once we've done that we can relax. Now, when our very survival is in question is not a good time to squander our limited resources on decadence.

..

Its like, youre starving but instead of going out to hunt you spend all day masturbating. Thats us as a species right now :)

I was referring to the Hacker News bubble.

I just think your claims are wrong. Human creativity is instinctual, whether it is applied to artistic or scientific endeavors. You're drawing a bright line that I don't believe exists.

Arts aren't just entertainment. They're a reflection of the soul of a culture and exist long after that culture is dead. If you look at every culture ever recorded in human history, you'll note there is a direct correlation between a culture's progression in art and a culture's progression in science and technology.

That said, I agree with you that most written literature has very little to offer most people. Most pieces of literature bear that designation because they are "teachable" in one form or another. Some are chosen because they perfect one very specific aspect of the craft of writing. Others, like Finnegan's Wake, are like P vs NP in that they provide an infinitely complex problem for intelligent minds to spend lifetimes chewing on without ever reaching a conclusion.

Something else to keep in mind: the medium is the message. The medium a piece of art chooses is significant. TV and movies will rot your brain regardless of whether it's The Big Bang Theory or Citizen Kane. Reading will improve your brain, regardless of whether you're reading Danielle Steel or Chaucer.

> TV and movies will rot your brain regardless of whether it's The Big Bang Theory or Citizen Kane.

I cannot agree with that at all. A great deal of cinema is heavy enough on information to be educational. Think about how much you can learn about history, literature, economics, or politics from watching Jean-Luc Godard’s output from 1962-1968. Even if the medium has flaws in the depth of its presentation, its compilation of citations to important literature that can then be followed up, can be invaluable.

And aren't plays reading? And do they really lose the goodness they have as "reading" when they move from the written page to a performance that just happens to be captured on film instead of before a live audience?

You're talking content. I'm talking neurobiology.

“rot your brain”?

Like.... little worms will be transmitted directly through the screen, and a bad smell will start pouring out your ears?

Give us a break.

Visual storytelling is fundamentally different from pure linguistic storytelling. It has much higher bandwidth, so it provides a richer set of simultaneous messages (in some ways similar to an opera or stage play or puppet show, but with even more flexibility over the visual content), but also causes a forced progression through time that makes it not as easily amenable to skimming, reading out of order, re-reading, cross-referencing, or pausing to write direct responses to the text.

But there’s a huge amount to learn and appreciate in visual stories. The best visual stories are incomparably better than the worst written schlock, and vice versa.

Can you elaborate? post some links or references? Sounds interesting.

Here's a decent article to start with: https://journal.thriveglobal.com/how-books-and-television-af...

If you do some searching, you'll find lots of ink spilled on the subject of "does TV rot your brain" and the cognitive benefits of reading.

The article you link to speaks about television, not cinema. Furthermore, its claim that the visual medium encourages passivity:

"you can just sit back and watch everything unfold without effort on your part. You’re less likely to pause to reflect on what’s happening."

does not apply to the considerable number of filmmakers (and occasional television content producers) who employ Brechtian alienation techniques.

Don't be dense. That sentence is from the reporter trying to make a study easier to understand to the common folk. Actually read the study referenced. There are also other studies that compare content and find it doesn't make a difference on the impact of the brain.

Just an idea,, Maybe all TV input looks the same to us, as regards its effect on the brain, but in reality its not.. Our tools for measuring anything to do with the brain/cognition are extremely crude currently.

eg. https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/scicurious-brain/ignobe...

To use computers as an analogy. If you were to examine it only physically, a hard drive filled with random garbage would look the same as one filled with our greatest works.

What's your motivation behind this comment? Do you really want to live in a world where some of humanity's greatest achievements are seen the same as random garbage? In any case, current brain scans are crude, but they measure function, not data. It's like putting an ammeter over an ethernet cable. You're not going to be able to see the data flowing over the wire, but you'll definitely be able to tell that data isn't flowing when it should be. You can also physically inspect a computer and see when a capacitor has blown.

"the medium is the message. The medium a piece of art chooses is significant. TV and movies will rot your brain regardless of whether it's The Big Bang Theory or Citizen Kane. Reading will improve your brain, regardless of whether you're reading Danielle Steel or Chaucer."

I have not heard that before.

The medium a piece of art chooses is significant, yes, (and in a lot of cases the creator chooses the wrong medium, eg. there are plenty of computer games out there that really want to be films, they dont make use of the strengths of the medium and even fight against it.)

The rest, I dont agree with.

Imo big bang, citizen kane, danielle Steel and chaucer are all somewhat equatable, because they are all fiction/entertainment. Personally I'd rate something educational or non-fiction over fiction in any medium

You're making the mistake of thinking that all fiction is entertainment. It's not. There's a reason humans are hard wired to share stories.

> Imo big bang, citizen kane, danielle Steel and chaucer are all somewhat equatable, because they are all fiction/entertainment.

It doesn't work that way. The medium has an impact on the formation and development of the brain itself.

So are you talking about exposure to certain mediums at certain ages?

>My point is simply that they are trivial. If all art suddenly disappeared it wouldnt really matter. If knowledge about, and/or the fruits of STEM stuff disappeared it would be a huge setback, it could cause civilization to collapse.

I'd say it's mostly the opposite: civilization is what remains when you remove most of the STEM -- and culture surely is that.

We could be savage warmongering apes with fully advanced STEM. And we often are.

How much less of a budget would NASA get without entertainment such as Star Wars to fire people's imagination?

Donald Norman in "Things That Make Us Smart" points out distinguishing between education and entertainment is not impossible but difficult. Artworks are performance outputs like proofs or designs. Then there are material sciences of their realizations and reproductions. We heroize the lone artist but artworks are social "supply chain" creations. For whatever reasons, outside the weekly pop charts for advertising attentions, we rearrange shelves of old and new artworks we consider exemplary in some regard. Kids study the outcomes and techniques both and keep remaking the present. The fictional novel, moving picture fiction "talkie" and lyric 3 minute tune are very specific genres. I imagine there are folks here who might credibly argue specific computers games are exemplary artworks worthy of study and emulation. "Humanities" along with many other of our departmental labels is not such a great term of art.

I'm surprised I haven't heard this point of view before. In the past I've often thought that the amount of value I get from enjoying the humanities is _completely_ disproportionate to the amount I pay for them. The majority of my leisure time is spent consuming art. But if I told someone that I spend $1000/yr purchasing music, they would likely be a little surprised. At the very least I would be an outlier. But I can relate to the other point of view that there is a _lot_ of other work being done today that enables the humanities to be enjoyed in the first place, so maybe valuing the direct product of the humanities at only $500-$1000/yr isn't _that_ far away from their true value.

I'm still not entirely convinced, but it's true that if the sharing of art vanished, I would find other ways to fill the gap without a huge amount of trouble (thought likely a large chunk of that would be me creating art for myself)

I get your point about disappearing art being reproducible, but I wouldn't be so quick to dismiss the role art has played for humans throughout our existence.

Not only does art greatly enhances the enjoyment of life, it's been a critically important survival tool throughout human history and pre-history. Even for primitive humans, art was used to help record and offload and pass on critical information through stories, waypoints/maps, and artworks. Our appreciation for beautiful forms, structures, rhythms, etc, is an evolutionary adaptation that helps us arouse interest and fascination with our world, inspiring us on to greater things and ultimately increasing our survival. This is why our appreciation of natural beauty and art is universal across cultures and time. Many have written and talked about these ideas. STEM doesn't happen without art.

Technology, on the other hand, has put us and our planet on the brink of extinction. Obviously we are now 'all in' on STEM for the survival of modern civilization, but there are a lot of people living in the world today who may disagree about the fruits of progress.

Need less STEM power, need more STEA(rt)M power ;)

Not everything we produce needs to be valued by how much they contribute to industrial/scientific civilization. I specify that because loss of much of STEM won't lead to collapse of civilization, it will only set us back to the dark ages. We'll begin again. Same as we'd do if all art disappeared.

Its not the same. If all existing art disappeared we would still be able to produce art at our current rate with no discernible or measurable difference in its quality or effect. Scientific or technological progress on the other hand is iterative. More advanced theories are slowly formulated on the backs of older ones. For precision tools for example you need to start off building crude tools with nothing, then use those to build the infrastructure that will allow you to build slightly more precise tools and so on.

"Its not the same. If all existing art disappeared we would still be able to produce art at our current rate with no discernible or measurable difference in its quality or effect."

That's a very strange idea.

If all existing novels dissappeared do you think we would produce novels straight away?

If all painting dissappeared would we paint with perspective, or in abstract, or just go for rough cave type paintings?

How long would it take us to come up with rhyming metre, or the observational essay, cinema or stand-up?

You think we'd start from having no references and create this immediately?

Maybe rhyming metre would never be recreated. In some cultures it wasnt. The phase space for what will entertain humans is seemingly almost infinitely detailed, there is no wrong or right way to do it. Eg. people can dance to banging rocks together just as effectively as to Mozart.

On the other hand, there is only one Pythagoras' theorem, and an infinitude of similar incorrect theorems. We postulate that intelligent aliens should discover Pythagoras' theorem but not Jazz or De Stijl.

They're not the same I agree. Which is why saying art is trivial and by implication disposable as compared to science is not IMO a healthy way to look at it. They are two sides of the same coin the way I see it. Through both we ultimately seek to understand reality inside and outside ourselves. I mean think about... why do we look at the stars? Why do we want to visit other planets? Why do we want to understand molecules and atoms? It's not all for the mere utility of being able to control materials and forces and therefore make our lives physically comfortable, though it's obviously a very important side effect. The core reason is we want to understand the meaning & beauty underlying reality, and art tries to do the same in a different way. So the way I see it, loss of STEM knowledge will set us back materially, while loss of all art and philosophy will set us back equally grievously in another sense.

I read a lot of books. Is that really better than watching TV? I have my doubts.

Inasmuch as cable TV is art, it would cause riots.

It's comments like these that remind me why I don't work in Silicon Valley.

"If all art suddenly disappeared it wouldnt really matter."

A lot of art inspires people.

How many young men saw that movie about Facebook, and didn't want to become the next billionaire?

Art influences the masses. Sometimes for the better, and sometimes for the worst. That FB movie for the worse, in my world, but I felt that eay about Disco, and Cowboy hats that Travolta brough upon us.

Art is everywhere. Now if we lost Banksy I don't think we would unravel.