But not really. Because if I truly cannot tell the difference between two objects or the way they sound, then they're the same to me, and I don't lose anything by listening to one over the other. If I could tell the difference, and it was important to me, then maybe I could do something about it.
"The pinnacle of human attention cannot be directed at everything, everywhere, all at once. We have to focus our attention on a limited subset of arts and pursuits, where discernment will always be high, and settle everywhere else."
This is exactly correct
Trust me, as a former piano/harpsichord tuner, that the audience absolutely can tell the difference between a perfectly tuned instrument and one that is badly tuned. They just can't put their finger on what that difference is.
It's the same as when the viola section of an orchestra is out of tune or the horns drag (both very common problems for amateur symphonies). The overall effect is "muddier" and less "brilliant" than other performances, and you can tell as a listener, but very few people in the audience can say "the violas were flat in the adagio section."
Take food, for example. If the tomato on your sandwich has fewer micronutrients than a different one, you may not be able to taste it, especially after the restaurant (or you) have slathered the sandwich with sauces full of salt and sugar and fat. So you want a chef you can trust who knows how to choose a tomato (and a farmer who knows how to grow one), whether you can taste the difference or not, or the result at scale is you end up deficient in various vitamins and minerals and can't figure out why you're tired all the time.
Whereas if they find that the tomato has 10% as much β-carotene as a tomato should or what have you, somebody will write an article about it that six in a thousand customers read and people will keep buying those tomatoes because they're cheaper and not even required to be labeled differently.
It's the difference between "so bad that people won't stand for it" and "worse, but people tolerate it", and the second one can be more of a problem specifically because people don't get mad enough about it to fix it.
It only takes one. Also, who says they're doing it at home? One hypochondriac willing to stay after work to use the equipment to to quell their fears (or substantiate them) is all it takes.
https://www.instagram.com/massspeceverything
Here’s the Taco Bell hot sauce: https://www.instagram.com/reel/C-A3FfOueRm/?igsh=MzRlODBiNWF...
Guess what. There's a lot of ADEK vitamines (fat soluble) out there. There's a lot stored up in our bodies. So much so that you can get a disease by pumping up the stores too much! Typically: TWO YEARS worth. And if that didn't set off a flag in your mind "oh, you mean vitamin A, of which two units are metabolically extracted from beta carotene" than you need to shut up right now throwing around beta carotene as an essential nutrient because you don't even know fundamental human metabolism!
Long story short, you know what else is really good at handling sloppy near-perfection-but-not-perfect differences -- -- -- biology. We've got 30% or so of our genome made of self-replicating viruses that snuck into a germ cell a billion years ago, yet somehow it all works, we've got 10 gorillion cells made from a single cellular machine at one point, building a functional reproductive-worthy body, and somehow that all works. People understand gusts and ideas as to what it's all doing, but do we know all of it, maybe not even most of it? No, we don't even know. It's like how magnets work, nobody knows. But big picture, the body has some capacity of adaptation and ranges of acceptable conditions, yet this TOMATO HYPOTHESIS seems to view the body as some sort of formula one engine that requires micrometers level clearances so it can go 20,000 RPM instead of the typical 6,000, and oh the medical castastrophe that should happen should someone eat a tomato of diminished nutritive content.
Now, I don't know what kind of world we live in here. Do we live in TOMATOLAND where people eat with every meal ketchup and marina sauce as the main dish? Are we worried that in TOMATOLAND that a 90% drop in essential amino acids of our favored cuisine will cause problems in population health? Because I'm pretty sure if a damned tomato comes up 90% short on beta carotene, that said food eater has TWO WHOLE YEARS to eat NON TOMATO FOODS such as CARROTS or FORTIFIED FOODS WHICH IS MOST FOODS which will easily replenish their vitamin A levels.
Music is just about subjective enjoyment - you will not get cancer if the piano was not in tune - and if you can't tell the difference then it is irrelevant to your experience.
If the piano is slightly out of tune, and the orchestra is slightly worse, people stop appreciating it (not realizing how much better it COULD be), and the art dies out, not because it's moved past it's time, or the culture moved on, or people don't want it, but because THEY DON'T EVEN KNOW WHAT THEY CAN HAVE.
That is 100% the case with Tomatoes. Most people I know (including myself) think tomatoes are bland boring filler. Annoying to cut. Barely add any flavour. Need salt + fat (cheese, bacon, etc) to really bring out their flavour.
And then one day we have a farmer's market heirloom tomato, and it's like our world gets shattered.
"I COULD be eating tomatoes like this on the regular? And I'm not? Whatever happened as a society to get me to this point was a crime, and needs to be undone."
But most people never even get to experience that, I think.
Surely the experts didn't all learn from each other; who was the first expert? That expert surely learned in some other way, so the only thing lost at the start of the analogy is the time required for someone interested to (re)achieve mastery.
About the tomatoes in the other comment chain? Your guess is as good as mine whether we can recover that knowledge.
Then again, pianos are a bad compromise. There is no way to have octaves and fifths on the same piano, much less thirds (both major and minor). We learn to live with it, but it isn't right, for simple pieces you can tune a piano for that exact song and make it sound much better - but if you get much more complex than "mary had a little lamb" you run into a conflict and some key will need to be two different notes.
"Better" is always relative, so it's often more correct to say it is/sounds "different".
For example, a true temperament guitar can sound weird/"wrong" to some people. A lot of folks are used to those compromises just being part of the sound. Similar to a "honky tonk" piano: if you tuned it differently, it would come across as a timbre change more than simply "better" tuning.
In the grand scheme of things, there are professions and arts that were once considered essential to everyday life and in ways that we today don't even consider. The profession is lost to time, but so is the need. It's the in-between transitional state, where the profession is in the process of dying, that is the most painful period.
Some day, the last note played on a piano will be played and lament for the piano tuner will die with it.
I have to disagree. When i dont do the reddit thing, the average quality of material products has been.. very bad. Amazon reviews don't seem to be enough to choose anything with an electric motor or a hinge that won't fall apart in a month of light use.
Personally, I'll happily pay for something with some features I don't need if it's got good build quality. Finding versions of MANY THINGS that aren't egregiously poorly made seems like it's getting harder?
Maybe this is just the temporal warp of getting older. As subjective time passes by more quickly, entropy is getting more of my attention than when I was younger and a day felt long. It's possible my perception that tools are engineered to the brink of functioning by a thread is survivorship bias. All the old tools that are still trucking are just the ones that survived. No way to know for sure, but if some convincingly thrice burned carpenter on reddit makes me think I oughta buy mikita I probably will.
I do think you're right that average quality has gone down. The MBAs of the world work hard to make their products function till the last day of the warranty and not a second longer, and that's a relatively recent business philosophy.
Buy a cheap tool. If it breaks, buy one for twice the price. If you lose it before it breaks, buy one for half the price.
I frequently buy cheap tools while I am learning about whether I need a "real" one and which one I should then select. I would suggest other people do so, too.
So then I bought another one of the same variety, with the expectation that once this (or the other one) dies, it can be cannibalized for spare parts if need be AND I won’t have to stop in the middle of doing something, cause of the backup.
It’s much the same for me when buying mechanical keyboards, computer mice, HDDs/SSDs or other technology too. My current CPU is on AM4 because I have the old one as a backup and a spare motherboard too.
What can I say, I like having backups and being reasonably frugal: e.g. getting a mid range phone since I don’t need fancy features and if anything happens to it it won’t be a big financial hit to replace (or use any old one for a bit, until the new one arrives, since none receive software updates for that many years).
I don’t have the eloquence to quite describe, but it’s the difference between a harbor freight miter saw, a Milwaukee, a Makita,(their 12 in. Dual-Bevel Sliding Compound Miter Saw, is amazing, but I still use my harbor freight dual bevel as well with a different blade for more construction ish stuff vs trim work / precision ish), and a festool.
My father drives me insane with this. He buys these $1 can openers that break every 3-9 months. He thinks I’m insane for paying $10-$20 for a can opener that has now lasted me 9+ years.
I probably would have been okay with a $5-7 one.
More succinctly : the cheap One is cheap for a reason. But that doesn’t mean you need the most expensive. Usually the cheap tools end up being more in the long run. (Breakage, poor quality output, time, material usage….)
When I first got a 10 inch table saw, I couldn’t believe how easy things were: setting the fence, cutting hard wood, depth adjustments were so much faster. But I still have my 8 inch craftsman I paid $5 for at a yard sale 20 years ago, and it’s not bad.
Harbor Freight is interesting to me, many of their items I won’t buy due to the quality, but certain other things tend to be excellent. However, I have noticed a trend where HF has started to have a few genuine quality offerings - but the price differential from a name brand shrinks drastically.
Example: their Hercules dual bevel miter saw- $349.99
A mostly comparable dewalt is $399.99.
(The dewalt is better in my opinion even because of how the detent overide and adjustment works, not to mention more positive stops )
An example of a gem however is their $50 electric planer. I own an older version of it. I don’t think it’s particularly great as your only / primary electric hand planer(except in a pinch), but the ability to use it roughly / places / ways that would damage a better planer. (Example, planing an old door while still mounted, or leveling a floor with luan ply, and planing areas that have adhesive, small nails, debris…)
Right, and that reason is because there is a market for testing tool waters to see if it is a tool that you even need. Often you cannot truly appreciate if a tool is a tool you should have before trying it. You can read testimonials from other people all day, every day, but until it is actually in your hand...
So, hypothetically, do you buy the $100 version with clear compromise, but good enough to offer some validation, or go for the $1,000 ultimate version from the hop? That's the gamble. If your assumption was right, you're in deep for $1,100, but if your assumption proves wrong, you're only out $100. That's the idea here. When in doubt, try the cheap tool, and when you're still wanting to use it beyond its constraints, you've proven you need the more premium product. If you leave it sitting on the shelf, now you know you don't need the tool at all.
As with all short-soundbite suggestions, it's not meant to apply to all situations. But in the average case, it is likely that you are better off gambling the hypothetical $100 – especially when the undertone is within a hobby context. It is very likely you will discover you didn't really like the hobby anyway. Of course, as always, it is assumed you will still bring your thinking cap to the table. Indeed, there are situations where going straight to the hypothetical $1,000 tool is the right choice, but the saying is merely pointing out that it isn't always the best choice like some people are inclined to believe.
As a DIY person with a garage filled with every type of tool imaginable, that is some of the best advice that can be given: buy cheap tools, but expensiver tools if it breaks.
IME, most people don't use the cheap tool enough to break it.
Cheap knives can’t hold an edge. Cheap laptops are slow, have bad battery life and crash. Cheap microphones make your speech more tiring to listen to. And so on.
Another side of that idea is that you often don't need the more expensive features. My immersion blender is the cheapest thing I could get my grubby little mitts on. It reaches to the bottom of the deepest pot I care to use it with, it's plenty powerful to chop up veggies smoothly, and it doesn't overheat on sustained use. It would not work in a professional kitchen, but I don't run a professional kitchen. Any additional expenditure would have been wasted, and if the item were bigger, were heavier, or had more attachments, those would just represent a waste of space in my house.
Not really. You can use powered bookshelf speakers or studio monitors just fine. That's what I do.
is this exact debate.
The specific problem here seems to be that soundbars have gone actively backward over time.
I had an old JBL soundbar whose only issue was that it had no Bluetooth security. This meant that someone in the apartment complex would randomly connect to it and blast us with 900 decibels of whatever they were watching--generally at 7:30AM.
So, we went searching for a replacement. We must have listened to every soundbar available at retail.
They were all expensive and all sucked--none of them were better than that 10 year old JBL.
Eventually we opted for a sound system that was not particularly cheap. And my wife still complains that it doesn't sound any better than the old soundbar we replaced. And she is correct.
Probably the only thing I could have done was cover it in aluminum foil. I thought about just opening it up and tearing out the antenna, but the casing was an injection molded piece with integrated clips. It would break on opening and not be possible to put back together.
I think they probably wouldn't have been as satisfied with a similarly priced soundbar. It's not because the soundbar couldn't be as good, but in practice usually wouldn't be. The intended audience isn't as discerning, so products don't have to be as good to sell well.
The trick with enthusiast recommendations is to limit scope creep if you're not trying to become a hobbyist yourself. Don't get talked into a complex audio system or a flashlight with fan cooling and 80000 lumens when your needs are basic, but do get the $80 powered speakers and the 18650-powered flashlight with USB charging.
On the one hand, panicking is unproductive: nothing is worse than it was last week.
On the other hand, finding out that a whole lot of infrastructure that was supposed to make your business better, actually isn't doing its job, is still significant. If your e-mail campaigns weren't clickable, and you lost a bunch of business but never noticed, you still lost a bunch of business. It still required uncommon discernment to even notice, but the impact was unquestionable.
Yes, in many contexts discernment matters. More broadly, being able to tell the difference in quality or performance is relevant when you've spent more time/money/effort to have a better result. Even if "no one could tell and it was fine anyway", then you could have saved that time/money/effort and put those resources to better use.
The classic answer to this is you need to improve your capacity to measure. Ie, taste ingredients and things constantly and learn with your mouth how the taste of your tomato will translate into the taste of your curry.
Just like the soloist and piano tuner in this story, subtle discernment is a huge part of expertise.
The OP doesn't say life isn't fine. He says that if we don't aim for perfection, if art ceases to matter because we cease to truly care, then there's no point. We'll eat shit and reproduce just the same -- but there is no point.
He's got a point.
Any "important" concert hall will tune the piano before each concert. If there is no concert for months the piano will sit untuned (but still be practiced on), but a piano tuner is cheap insurance that nothing happened. If there are two concerts on the same day they might or might not tune between them.
Of course there are a lot of "small-town" concert halls where the piano is not tuned as often. Your local high school probably isn't tuning the piano before the concert - even though the piano is moved from the choir room to the stage before the concert which is the most likely way to mess up tuning.
https://www.ribbonfarm.com/series/mediocratopia/
I’m fascinated by mediocrity as an aspiration, understood as optimization resistance and withheld reserves. Mediocrity is slouching towards survival. Mediocrity is pragmatic resistance to totalizing thought. Mediocrity is fat in the system. Mediocrity is playful, foxy improvisation.
I sill enjoy resistance, reserves, survival, pragmatics, fat buffers and improvisation better without any mediocrity I would say.
The creative mediums of the day are tiktok videos and video games.
It is the same line of thought from back in the day that the electric guitar is just noise, people should play a "real" instrument like the clarinet!
Rap is just noise, they aren't even singing! People should play a "real" instrument like the electric guitar.
Tiktok is not art! I am talking "real" art like Marcel Duchamp or Andy Warhol's movie Sleep. No one is making REAL art like that anymore I tell ya.
> Tiktok is not art
These two sentiments aren't that uncommon amongst gen z either, in my experience.
His point is excessively perfectionistic at best, to the point of detriment, and at worst... well, it's pedantic.
I violated HN guidelines by being too flippant in my answer.
But to get back on topic I’m not sure I get how wine is the same.
Wine is a product with large taste variations between the different regions and vine varieties. Plus depending of the year you will again have variations in the grapes which can be more or less balanced during the fabrication.
Some producers are known to have produced particularly great wine some specific years which lead to say bottles being very expensive but most of it is very much fact based.
The only dubious thing I see in wine is that the way aging changes the taste of a bottle is not an improvement indefinitely. At some point the wine just gets worst and the search for very old bottle is mostly posturing.
There's still an open question about whether the new fiddles are better, or that the old ones are deteriorating, or both.
Disclosure: Working double bassist. And don't get me started about bows. ;-)
It's not publicized but there was a documentary about how they almost lost far too much of their raw abilities gained since the 19th century when it comes to institutional knowledge which had always been essential to the way they had made pianos in a less-then-fully documented way, that had been passed on through generations.
Most likely some of the most talented builders at earlier times were not very literate with paperwork anyway.
The modern company dropped the ball for quite a while through attrition, until an urgent effort was undertaken to preserve what they had and uncover any little tidbits that were inadvertently lost. A lot of careful measurements were taken like never before, and documentation produced.
I doubt if the pianos are the same, but don't think I would be able to tell the difference either.
This page has some excellent little videos itself:
https://www.steinway.com/news/features/inside-the-new-york-c...
So he was left unsure how he felt.
Maybe? You’re assuming that someone between now and whenever humanity ends will have the time and resources to rediscover it. I’m not sure I’d take that bet.
If the Boeing Effect is anything to go by, I don't think that assumption can hold in the short/medium term. Yes, maybe a century from now we'd have some set of pressures and alignment of various incentives such that we rebuild/rediscover this lost knowledge. But it'll be bleak until then, and we can't rely on it to happen in our generation.
But I'd go further and argue it's deeper. Sometimes it's not just about any one single "node" being lost. The network of nodes and the unique connections and weights between them will forever be gone.
To borrow yet another saying/aphorism. "It's much easier to destroy something than to build it."
Only if the conditions required for re-discovery occur in the future. Those conditions may include things like a thriving world market in high-performance acoustic pianos, the need to have only the best pianos played at court, the need for one king to be or appear wealthier than another king etc. Acoustic pianos may never be that important to humanity again, so it's not clear we'll recover all information we gained when they were.
Archeologists often try to reconstruct ancient practices. Although modern humans have the advantage of a much larger basis of knowledge, it's not always trivial nor even always possible to reconstruct old ideas.
Learning is a feedback loop process. Whether you can recover knowledge depends on how successfully you can replicate the feedback loop. And that depends on ambient factors.
There's 8 billion of us. There's more than enough human attention to go around.
More so, there being enough attention to go around is tangential to whether the sum of our attention colors in all the space.
We as a society don't want to lose artistry that was painstakingly developed - there's no guarantee it will ever be developed to that level of sophistication again. I don't want future generations to look at my generation as we do the dark ages.
I think it's easy right now to think that progress is guaranteed or the opposite - that it's impossible to achieve. As population levels out civilization will need to become more about archiving what we know than pushing the envelope but no one wants to lose information.
That doesn't mean that irrationals don't exist or aren't worth exploring.
Based on what? You'd have to have somebody who could compare the past to the current state to establish a delta (or lack of one) and make that assertion.
Consciousness, downgraded due to cultural conditioning.
For example: sometimes climate change is a huge deal, other times it is just fine. Consciousness (2024) seems unable to (try to) be consistent, it's like it lacks an index or logic processor or something. Maybe there's a startup idea here somehow.
Perhaps we will find out if Mother Nature shares your sense of humour.
Mother nature isn't a humorous process, it's physics.
Also: it is not possible to know if everything is solely physics based. Faith comes in many forms, and scientism is one of them.
You and your kind are welcome to play the game as you like, and you will be rewarded accordingly, as you are as we speak.
Saaaay....how's that climate change thing going?
Anything new and exciting happening in the middle East these days?
Don't worry though, "it's all good". And that which isn't good will be fixed by science and democracy, "any day now". This is Known.
More seriously...for fun, I can think of a game where we would begin here:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mysticism
...and then each post links to other articles on the internet in an exercise to reveal which of the two of us has more genuine competence in this domain.
I am highly confident that I would be the victor in such a contest. Can you think of any games where you could outperform me, Surely Highly Rational In Fact Human?
So I think chucking the Earth into the sun is intentionally being over-dramatic.
Actually I think ending it on a joke was not the best move, because it does muddle things a bit. The stakes are not so high but it does matter. The piano was not bad enough for the audience to notice, but it was bad enough for the player to notice. If it is bad enough to bother the person using it, it is bad enough to matter.
I mean, if the player is self-criticizing like most elite people do, they probably play better if they know everything, even the little stuff that the audience barely notices, is going right.
It truly is a poor craftsman who blames the tool.
While a good craftsman can use some bad tools to good results, they almost always use good tools (not using good tools is often done to prove a point).
More recently and more zeitgeist, Breakdancing in the olympics. Most people have no idea about breakdancing yet alone how its culture has evolved. Viewed from their lens Australia was a terrible joke easily made fun of, yet to the breaking community Rachael Gunn is a hero and being defended. [2]
[1] https://youtube.com/watch?v=7UsYHo5iarM&pp=ygUVR3JlZWsgc3Rhd...
It's a totally different thing than breaking as creative expression. There's nothing wrong with being confidently goofy at a party, sure, but if breaking wants to remain a method of expression and nothing else, it shouldn't be in the olympics. Otherwise it's fair to be puzzled (and amused) that a subpar athlete reached that level of competition.
The roofers did a shit job, but it looked so professionally done and I paid them well. Six months later the roof started to leak, by that time they were gone... The contractors widened the doorway but didn't bother checking the house plan and the load was incorrect, the structural engineer had a heart attack looking at that.
We sure as hell are cooked, son, we just ain't stopped movin' yet.
1. Members of the audience that do not notice anything at all 2. Members of the audience that only notice it subconsciously, affecting some overall feeling of quality (an analogy would be typography which operates mostly in this realm) 3. Members of the audience that consciously notice that something is off, somewhere 4. The conductor that exactly knows that the piano is off 5. The tuner that exactly knows what and where is wrong with the piano
I don't feel that statement is stating that if X happens we're screwed; its stating that if X happens why is life worth living?
Its only one metric among many, but rates of depression and anxiety diagnosis are at an all time high.
The problem with this line of thinking -- "If X happens then we'll all be cooked!" -- is that it ignores the fact that X already has been happening and yet life is just fine.
There's an infinite number of pursuits in which expert practitioners could theoretically possess a level of discernment so sublime that nobody else can understand it, let alone appreciate it.
A huge number of these arts will either never be practiced, or were practiced in the past but have already decline. And yet there's no mass ennui or clamoring to steer the Earth into the sun.
The pinnacle of human attention cannot be directed at everything, everywhere, all at once. We have to focus our attention on a limited subset of arts and pursuits, where discernment will always be high, and settle everywhere else.