Books, music, and all other art forms, unlike apples, are not fungible, not even items of the same “quality” (however defined).
BTW, I have that collection of the complete Bach in 160 CDs (and have listened to all of it at least twice). And I’m collecting the complete Masaahi Suzuki recordings of the Bach cantatas (which are completely different from the Leonhardt/Harnoncourt performances in the Bach 2000 set), and I might spring for the John Eliot Gardiner cantatas if he manages to issue them as a complete set. I also went to this performance yesterday of an art form dating back all of 60 years (the drums are from the long-long-ago, but this use of them is not), and buy everything Greg Egan writes as soon as it comes out.
Yes, no-one can read/listen to/view more than the tiniest fraction of what there is, but to read nothing old, or to read nothing new, are selection rules that have only simplicity in their favour. There is no one-dimensional scale of “quality”.
Books, music, and all other art forms, unlike apples, are not fungible, not even items of the same “quality” (however defined).
A point which applies equally to old and new. And ultimately every choice comes down to read or don’t read...
Yes, no-one can read/listen to/view more than the tiniest fraction of what there is, but to read nothing old, or to read nothing new, are selection rules that have only simplicity in their favour. There is no one-dimensional scale of “quality”.
I think you’re deprecating them too quickly. Let’s take the 90% guess at face-value: if you are selecting primarily from just the most recent 10% and quality—however multidimensional you choose to define it—then you need to somehow make up for throwing out 9/10ths of all the best books, the ones which happened to be old!
It’d be like running a machine learning or statistical algorithm which starts by throwing out 90% of the data from consideration; yeah, maybe that’s a good idea, but you’re going to have a hard time selecting from the remaining 10% so much better that it makes up for it.
Books, music, and all other art forms, unlike apples, are not fungible, not even items of the same “quality” (however defined).
BTW, I have that collection of the complete Bach in 160 CDs (and have listened to all of it at least twice). And I’m collecting the complete Masaahi Suzuki recordings of the Bach cantatas (which are completely different from the Leonhardt/Harnoncourt performances in the Bach 2000 set), and I might spring for the John Eliot Gardiner cantatas if he manages to issue them as a complete set. I also went to this performance yesterday of an art form dating back all of 60 years (the drums are from the long-long-ago, but this use of them is not), and buy everything Greg Egan writes as soon as it comes out.
Yes, no-one can read/listen to/view more than the tiniest fraction of what there is, but to read nothing old, or to read nothing new, are selection rules that have only simplicity in their favour. There is no one-dimensional scale of “quality”.
A point which applies equally to old and new. And ultimately every choice comes down to read or don’t read...
I think you’re deprecating them too quickly. Let’s take the 90% guess at face-value: if you are selecting primarily from just the most recent 10% and quality—however multidimensional you choose to define it—then you need to somehow make up for throwing out 9/10ths of all the best books, the ones which happened to be old!
It’d be like running a machine learning or statistical algorithm which starts by throwing out 90% of the data from consideration; yeah, maybe that’s a good idea, but you’re going to have a hard time selecting from the remaining 10% so much better that it makes up for it.