If it weren’t for the piano soloist (the conductor probably didn’t notice, he just knew to defer to the piano soloist’s concerns), we would have played the concert on a very slightly out-of-tune piano, and then...
What?
Contrary to you, I think its definitely possible there’s someone in the audience who would have been able to tell the piano was slightly out of tune. But I also think more would have unconsciously noticed the music was very very slightly worse than what it could have been. Slightly less detail which you could notice and recognize perfection.
Maybe not so much of a loss or a gain in this circumstance, but definitely a loss. And if you compound this across all of society, if everything is 1% worse for no reason anyone can put their finger on anymore, you just have a worse world, with colors slightly dimmer, appliances slightly less ergonomic, fashion slightly less stylish, games, books, and movies slightly less meaningful.
I think in many circumstances you’ll still be able to buy the high-quality thing, but it takes a while to get to economic equilibriums, and it would be nice if those selecting bundles of goods to sell (like a concert) remembered 1% better everything adds up before transitioning to lesser quality but cheaper goods.
I also think there’s room for making AI produced products significantly better than the human produced ones, so that also should be kept in mind. If you can gain 1% by transitioning to AI, you should by my same logic.
I think in many circumstances you’ll still be able to buy the high-quality thing
This might be a problem if let’s say, today the cheap thing costs $2K and the expensive one costs $10K, but tomorrow the cheap thing will cost $10 (automated), and the expensive one is still the same $10K.
Because, from the perspective of the future piano tuner, it changes the salary progression from “$2K as a junior, $10K as an expert” to “unemployable as a junior, $10K as an expert”… but how are you supposed to become an expert if you never had a job before that?
Might be worth thinking about the many markets that exist rather than thinking this is some single homogenous market.
A lot of people will still play pianos and take private piano lessons. That market may not be able to afford the $10 tuning but could still support the $2, less perfect, tuning.
If that hypothesis is correct then less experienced tuners still have a path for skill development and gaining experience.
I think another path is that some shift from a market setting (paying someone else) to DIY and start learning how to tune their own, or their friends, piano. I suspect the hand tools needed are not that complex or expensive so that would not be a barrier.
Perhaps the biggest barrier might be beginners and less experienced tuners might not have developed ear and without a good mentor to help them train their ear might not be able to be as good as they perhaps could.
It may end up that way, but it will be much more of a lottery than today.
Basically, today you get some feedback along the way. As a junior, either you make junior salary which means you are doing well for a junior, and perhaps a few years later you will qualify for a senior and start getting senior salary. But if things go wrong, then either you never get the senior salary… but at least you got paid the junior salary for a few years, so your effort paid off at least somewhat; or you can’t even find a junior job, which sucks, but at least you wasted less time.
In the “senior or bust” system, you need to spend a lot of time studying and practicing first, and the first feedback that you wasted all that time and money can come a decade later. Sounds like only a quantitative difference, but I assume that expert piano tuners are rare (I may be wrong here), so the quantitative difference may become a difference between “there are a few” and “there is none”.
It’s less about the tuning of the piano itself than the knock on effect it has on the pianist. Even if the audience can barely tell the difference, the pianist themself certainly could, as could the conductor!
Tuning the instrument may well have had a large effect on the audience’s experience overall, because the pianist will play much better on an instrument they enjoy playing—it’s a totally different experience hearing someone perform while they’re enjoying their own art, vs someone who’s distracted by an annoying F# that sounds slightly off in every scale.
You’re ignoring the part where making something cheaper is a real benefit. For example, it’s usually better to have a world where everyone can access a thing of slightly lower quality, than a world where only a small elite can access a thing, but the thing is of slightly higher quality.
I do worry we are already seeing this. To quote the word exactly, the ‘enshittification’ of everything we can buy and services we are provided is real. The best example of this high-quality clothing, but pretty much everything you can buy online at Amazon shows this too. It’s important to be able to maintain quality separate of market dynamics, IMO, at least because some people value it (and consumers aren’t really voting if there is no choice).
People do say this is the case, but I’m skeptical. I feel like pretty much everything I use or consume is better than it would have been 10 years ago, and where its not I bet I could find a better version with a bit of shopping around.
So, I’m mostly referencing trends in e-commerce here. For example, first Amazon put storefronts out of business by allowing drop-shipping of cheaply manufactured goods with no warranty. Now, Temu is competing with Amazon by exploiting import tax loopholes, selling the same items at below production price, many of which contain pthalates and other chemical compounds at multiple times the safe standards. This is a standard trick for monopolisation pulled by large giants: they will then rack the prices back up once they have a stable user base, and start making profit. Uber did this.
The drop in clothing standard is real, though, because fast fashion didn’t really exist until the 2000s.10 years is not far enough back: you need to go about 25-30. If I want high quality clothing made fairtrade, I now have to go on specialist websites like Good on You which compile databases of very niche companies and pay upwards of $100 for an item of clothing. I cannot get something that I expect to last long by walking into a department store.
Enshittification also exists in the apps and services that have been established via monopolisation or acquiring an existing user base.
Only the people who want to buy from Temu buy from Temu. The existence of Temu does not reduce the availability of higher quality options.
While you can buy fast fashion articles, you can also buy outdoor fashion. If I buy a buttoned outdoor shirt today from Mammut today, it’s not made from shitty cotton but material on which bacteria don’t grow as easy and made from a material so that I can easily wash the shirt without any need for dry cleaning or ironing. As far as I can see it’s also likely more durable.
Uniqlo is a department store and if I ask ChatGPT it suggests that it sells more durable clothing today than the average clothing in the 1990s.
It’s possible to buy low-quality fast fashion but there are quality options available as far as clothing goes that simply didn’t exist 25-30 years ago.
Uniqlo is a department store and if I ask ChatGPT it suggests that it sells more durable clothing today than the average clothing in the 1990s.
And if I ask Claude it tells me there have been many studies showing that ready-made clothing has generally declined in quality over time. I think it would be better, in this circumstance, for you to use a real source.
Ready-made clothing is a huge category. Different clothing is optimized for different purposes. It might be true that the average piece of clothing sold is of lower durability than thirty years ago, but that does not negate the fact that quality options are available.
There are fast fashion brands. It’s a business model that works for many brands on the market. It’s however not the business model of all brands and Uniqlo in particular goes for low-cost high-quality clothing including the latest clothing technology.
Technology advancement means that there are more options to produce high-quality clothing than existed three decades ago and Uniqlo takes advantage of that. Uniqlo is also big enough to have it’s own department stores.
This response does not address the substance of my comment; ChatGPT is still not a reliable source, and you haven’t provided any sources at all in this further elaboration.
It addresses the fact that the argument you made doesn’t work. I would think that the argument is part of the substance of your comment. The fact that a study shows that the average quality went down does not imply that quality choices aren’t available.
It’s correct that I don’t provide strong evidence for the quality of Uniqlo, but this is just a comment.
I didn’t make an argument; I provided an illustrative example of why LLMs are useless as sources. The fact that Claude said there was a study does not mean there was a study in real life, and your apparent assumption that Claude’s statements are always true reflects very negatively on your epistemics.
(Edit: I asked for it to cite the studies in question; half of them were confabulated and AFAICT only one of them contained what Claude said it did. (Note that this is Claude 3 Haiku, which isn’t the best; I’d expect frontier models to name four or maybe even five real papers in a list of six (and, with lower confidence, to have a more accurate understanding of the papers’ contents)). Results below:
“A New Textiles Economy: Redesigning Fashion’s Future”—Report by the Ellen MacArthur Foundation (2017) - This is a think-tank report (available here) rather than a study. However, it does actually exist. Claude says it “noted that the number of times clothes are worn before disposal has decreased by 36% compared to 15 years ago.” It really does say this! Page 19, citing as a source the “Circular Fibres Initiative analysis based on Euromonitor International Apparel & Footwear 2016 Edition (volume sales trends 2005–2015).” (Teeeeeechnically the report claims the clothing is still wearable and therefore throwing it away is a waste, which isn’t the same thing as poor durability causing decreased wear time, but humans cite studies that support something a little to the left of their point all the time so in the interests of fairness I won’t mark it down for that). A-.
“The State of Fashion 2016”—Report by the McKinsey Global Fashion Index (2016) - This one seems to be real! (Technically, it’s “The State of Fashion 2017″—their first report, so Claude can’t have meant an earlier one—but it was released in 2016 and half of it is an overview of same, so IMO it’s close enough.) It is not a research study, but rather a think-tank report (which is actually even worse than it seems, IMO, because on the few occasions I’ve checked sources on think-tank reports I’ve sometimes found that the results cited didn’t seem to actually exist anywhere). Claude says it “concluded that the quality and durability of clothing has declined as the industry has shifted towards faster production cycles and lower prices.” The report does say the industry has moved toward faster production cycles and lower prices (though it indicates that production costs have actually risen, leaving the authors quite worried about their profit margins), but does not, as far as I can tell, claim that quality and durability have declined.
“Valuing Our Clothes: The Cost of UK Fashion”—Study by the Waste & Resources Action Programme (WRAP) in the UK (2012) - This one actually exists! (Full report here). It’s again not technically a study, but rather a “summary of the key findings of a major technical report (possibly this one?) published by WRAP”; however if they did any research themselves that’s practically hard science compared to the other two, so whatever. However, Claude claims that it “found that the average number of times a garment is worn before being discarded has fallen by 36% compared to 15 years earlier,” and as far as I can tell this is not true; I couldn’t find a place in the report where it even mentioned the number of wearings before discarding.
“Apparel and Footwear Benchmarking Analysis”—Report by the American Apparel & Footwear Association—Confabulated (there are reports with similar titles from organizations which are not this one, but this specific report does not exist)
“The Apparel Sourcing Caravan’s New Route to the Market”—Report by the Boston Consulting Group—Confabulated
“Clothing Durability and the Creation of Value”—Study by the University of Cambridge Institute for Manufacturing (2018) - Confabulated
Posting this list of sources without annotations would have been of negative value, leading unwary readers to change their minds based on studies that don’t exist and forcing somewhat cannier ones to spend what could be several hours checking the bullshit I produced in a few minutes. For this reason as well as the others I discussed, I do not think it is appropriate to cite the statements of LLMs as though they constitute evidence.)
Uniqlo, once lauded for its affordable yet high-quality basics, has faced criticism in recent years for a noticeable decline in the quality of its clothing. Customers have reported that fabrics feel thinner and less durable, with some items showing signs of wear after just a few washes. Online reviews and consumer feedback suggest that the brand’s earlier collections featured more robust construction and longer-lasting materials, while more recent offerings seem to prioritize cost-cutting over durability. This perceived decline in quality has sparked concern among long-time fans of the brand, who feel that Uniqlo’s focus on fast fashion has come at the expense of the reliability and longevity that once set it apart.
Gosh—that’s just the opposite of what you said! Does this mean you’ve been proven wrong? No, it means I told it to argue that Uniqlo’s clothes have decreased in quality over time and it did, because LLMs will take any position you ask of them regardless of whether or not it’s true.
I don’t assume that all studies that Claude would give me are true. Are there studies that say X is not a good question to ask an LLM if you want to know whether X is true.
It’s common in debate to say even if X, X->Y does not follow. That is not asserting that X is true.
If you ask an LLM it gives you a lot of individual facts in a explanation that help with understanding. It helps with understanding the factors that go into a lot of current fashion being less durable and how those don’t apply to Uniqlo or Mammut for that matter.
With regards to its “help” understanding why Uniqlo didn’t decline, it is, as I demonstrated above, equally good at providing plausible-sounding explanations for why Uniqlo did decline. Here, again, is ChatGPT:
Several factors likely contributed to the perceived decline in quality at Uniqlo, reflecting broader trends in the fashion industry and specific business strategies the brand has pursued.
1. Cost-Cutting and Scale: As Uniqlo expanded globally, the need to maintain competitive pricing while increasing production volumes may have led to compromises in material quality. To keep costs low and meet growing demand, the company might have shifted to cheaper fabrics and production methods, sacrificing the durability and feel that initially attracted customers.
2. Fast Fashion Influence: Although Uniqlo markets itself as a provider of “lifewear” rather than fast fashion, its business model has increasingly incorporated elements of fast fashion, such as frequent new collections and quick production cycles. This shift often prioritizes speed and cost-efficiency over quality, resulting in garments that are less durable.
3. Supply Chain Pressures: Like many global retailers, Uniqlo has faced pressure from fluctuating raw material costs, labor costs, and logistical challenges. To mitigate these pressures, the company may have opted for lower-quality materials or reduced quality control measures in manufacturing processes.
4. Shifts in Consumer Expectations: As consumers have grown accustomed to low prices and frequent turnover in their wardrobes, brands like Uniqlo might have adjusted their offerings to meet these expectations, leading to a focus on affordability and trendiness over long-lasting quality.
5. Strategic Decisions: Uniqlo’s parent company, Fast Retailing, has focused on aggressive expansion and maintaining high profitability. Strategic decisions to prioritize these goals over maintaining the brand’s initial quality standards could have influenced the decline. The emphasis on rapid growth might have overshadowed the commitment to quality that once defined the brand.
Did you verify what ChatGPT told you before you repeated it as fact?
Contrary to you, I think its definitely possible there’s someone in the audience who would have been able to tell the piano was slightly out of tune. But I also think more would have unconsciously noticed the music was very very slightly worse than what it could have been. Slightly less detail which you could notice and recognize perfection.
Maybe not so much of a loss or a gain in this circumstance, but definitely a loss. And if you compound this across all of society, if everything is 1% worse for no reason anyone can put their finger on anymore, you just have a worse world, with colors slightly dimmer, appliances slightly less ergonomic, fashion slightly less stylish, games, books, and movies slightly less meaningful.
I think in many circumstances you’ll still be able to buy the high-quality thing, but it takes a while to get to economic equilibriums, and it would be nice if those selecting bundles of goods to sell (like a concert) remembered 1% better everything adds up before transitioning to lesser quality but cheaper goods.
I also think there’s room for making AI produced products significantly better than the human produced ones, so that also should be kept in mind. If you can gain 1% by transitioning to AI, you should by my same logic.
This might be a problem if let’s say, today the cheap thing costs $2K and the expensive one costs $10K, but tomorrow the cheap thing will cost $10 (automated), and the expensive one is still the same $10K.
Because, from the perspective of the future piano tuner, it changes the salary progression from “$2K as a junior, $10K as an expert” to “unemployable as a junior, $10K as an expert”… but how are you supposed to become an expert if you never had a job before that?
Might be worth thinking about the many markets that exist rather than thinking this is some single homogenous market.
A lot of people will still play pianos and take private piano lessons. That market may not be able to afford the $10 tuning but could still support the $2, less perfect, tuning.
If that hypothesis is correct then less experienced tuners still have a path for skill development and gaining experience.
I think another path is that some shift from a market setting (paying someone else) to DIY and start learning how to tune their own, or their friends, piano. I suspect the hand tools needed are not that complex or expensive so that would not be a barrier.
Perhaps the biggest barrier might be beginners and less experienced tuners might not have developed ear and without a good mentor to help them train their ear might not be able to be as good as they perhaps could.
Educational loans are the obvious answer, and are why I’m not worried about these kinds of arguments.
It may end up that way, but it will be much more of a lottery than today.
Basically, today you get some feedback along the way. As a junior, either you make junior salary which means you are doing well for a junior, and perhaps a few years later you will qualify for a senior and start getting senior salary. But if things go wrong, then either you never get the senior salary… but at least you got paid the junior salary for a few years, so your effort paid off at least somewhat; or you can’t even find a junior job, which sucks, but at least you wasted less time.
In the “senior or bust” system, you need to spend a lot of time studying and practicing first, and the first feedback that you wasted all that time and money can come a decade later. Sounds like only a quantitative difference, but I assume that expert piano tuners are rare (I may be wrong here), so the quantitative difference may become a difference between “there are a few” and “there is none”.
It’s less about the tuning of the piano itself than the knock on effect it has on the pianist. Even if the audience can barely tell the difference, the pianist themself certainly could, as could the conductor!
Tuning the instrument may well have had a large effect on the audience’s experience overall, because the pianist will play much better on an instrument they enjoy playing—it’s a totally different experience hearing someone perform while they’re enjoying their own art, vs someone who’s distracted by an annoying F# that sounds slightly off in every scale.
Yeah, I would also imagine that’d be the dominant factor in the real world.
You’re ignoring the part where making something cheaper is a real benefit. For example, it’s usually better to have a world where everyone can access a thing of slightly lower quality, than a world where only a small elite can access a thing, but the thing is of slightly higher quality.
I do worry we are already seeing this. To quote the word exactly, the ‘enshittification’ of everything we can buy and services we are provided is real. The best example of this high-quality clothing, but pretty much everything you can buy online at Amazon shows this too. It’s important to be able to maintain quality separate of market dynamics, IMO, at least because some people value it (and consumers aren’t really voting if there is no choice).
People do say this is the case, but I’m skeptical. I feel like pretty much everything I use or consume is better than it would have been 10 years ago, and where its not I bet I could find a better version with a bit of shopping around.
So, I’m mostly referencing trends in e-commerce here. For example, first Amazon put storefronts out of business by allowing drop-shipping of cheaply manufactured goods with no warranty. Now, Temu is competing with Amazon by exploiting import tax loopholes, selling the same items at below production price, many of which contain pthalates and other chemical compounds at multiple times the safe standards. This is a standard trick for monopolisation pulled by large giants: they will then rack the prices back up once they have a stable user base, and start making profit. Uber did this.
The drop in clothing standard is real, though, because fast fashion didn’t really exist until the 2000s.10 years is not far enough back: you need to go about 25-30. If I want high quality clothing made fairtrade, I now have to go on specialist websites like Good on You which compile databases of very niche companies and pay upwards of $100 for an item of clothing. I cannot get something that I expect to last long by walking into a department store.
Enshittification also exists in the apps and services that have been established via monopolisation or acquiring an existing user base.
Only the people who want to buy from Temu buy from Temu. The existence of Temu does not reduce the availability of higher quality options.
While you can buy fast fashion articles, you can also buy outdoor fashion. If I buy a buttoned outdoor shirt today from Mammut today, it’s not made from shitty cotton but material on which bacteria don’t grow as easy and made from a material so that I can easily wash the shirt without any need for dry cleaning or ironing. As far as I can see it’s also likely more durable.
Uniqlo is a department store and if I ask ChatGPT it suggests that it sells more durable clothing today than the average clothing in the 1990s.
It’s possible to buy low-quality fast fashion but there are quality options available as far as clothing goes that simply didn’t exist 25-30 years ago.
And if I ask Claude it tells me there have been many studies showing that ready-made clothing has generally declined in quality over time. I think it would be better, in this circumstance, for you to use a real source.
Ready-made clothing is a huge category. Different clothing is optimized for different purposes. It might be true that the average piece of clothing sold is of lower durability than thirty years ago, but that does not negate the fact that quality options are available.
There are fast fashion brands. It’s a business model that works for many brands on the market. It’s however not the business model of all brands and Uniqlo in particular goes for low-cost high-quality clothing including the latest clothing technology.
Technology advancement means that there are more options to produce high-quality clothing than existed three decades ago and Uniqlo takes advantage of that. Uniqlo is also big enough to have it’s own department stores.
This response does not address the substance of my comment; ChatGPT is still not a reliable source, and you haven’t provided any sources at all in this further elaboration.
It addresses the fact that the argument you made doesn’t work. I would think that the argument is part of the substance of your comment. The fact that a study shows that the average quality went down does not imply that quality choices aren’t available.
It’s correct that I don’t provide strong evidence for the quality of Uniqlo, but this is just a comment.
I didn’t make an argument; I provided an illustrative example of why LLMs are useless as sources. The fact that Claude said there was a study does not mean there was a study in real life, and your apparent assumption that Claude’s statements are always true reflects very negatively on your epistemics.
(Edit: I asked for it to cite the studies in question; half of them were confabulated and AFAICT only one of them contained what Claude said it did. (Note that this is Claude 3 Haiku, which isn’t the best; I’d expect frontier models to name four or maybe even five real papers in a list of six (and, with lower confidence, to have a more accurate understanding of the papers’ contents)). Results below:
“A New Textiles Economy: Redesigning Fashion’s Future”—Report by the Ellen MacArthur Foundation (2017) - This is a think-tank report (available here) rather than a study. However, it does actually exist. Claude says it “noted that the number of times clothes are worn before disposal has decreased by 36% compared to 15 years ago.” It really does say this! Page 19, citing as a source the “Circular Fibres Initiative analysis based on Euromonitor International Apparel & Footwear 2016 Edition (volume sales trends 2005–2015).” (Teeeeeechnically the report claims the clothing is still wearable and therefore throwing it away is a waste, which isn’t the same thing as poor durability causing decreased wear time, but humans cite studies that support something a little to the left of their point all the time so in the interests of fairness I won’t mark it down for that). A-.
“The State of Fashion 2016”—Report by the McKinsey Global Fashion Index (2016) - This one seems to be real! (Technically, it’s “The State of Fashion 2017″—their first report, so Claude can’t have meant an earlier one—but it was released in 2016 and half of it is an overview of same, so IMO it’s close enough.) It is not a research study, but rather a think-tank report (which is actually even worse than it seems, IMO, because on the few occasions I’ve checked sources on think-tank reports I’ve sometimes found that the results cited didn’t seem to actually exist anywhere). Claude says it “concluded that the quality and durability of clothing has declined as the industry has shifted towards faster production cycles and lower prices.” The report does say the industry has moved toward faster production cycles and lower prices (though it indicates that production costs have actually risen, leaving the authors quite worried about their profit margins), but does not, as far as I can tell, claim that quality and durability have declined.
“Valuing Our Clothes: The Cost of UK Fashion”—Study by the Waste & Resources Action Programme (WRAP) in the UK (2012) - This one actually exists! (Full report here). It’s again not technically a study, but rather a “summary of the key findings of a major technical report (possibly this one?) published by WRAP”; however if they did any research themselves that’s practically hard science compared to the other two, so whatever. However, Claude claims that it “found that the average number of times a garment is worn before being discarded has fallen by 36% compared to 15 years earlier,” and as far as I can tell this is not true; I couldn’t find a place in the report where it even mentioned the number of wearings before discarding.
“Apparel and Footwear Benchmarking Analysis”—Report by the American Apparel & Footwear Association—Confabulated (there are reports with similar titles from organizations which are not this one, but this specific report does not exist)“The Apparel Sourcing Caravan’s New Route to the Market”—Report by the Boston Consulting Group—Confabulated“Clothing Durability and the Creation of Value”—Study by the University of Cambridge Institute for Manufacturing (2018)- ConfabulatedPosting this list of sources without annotations would have been of negative value, leading unwary readers to change their minds based on studies that don’t exist and forcing somewhat cannier ones to spend what could be several hours checking the bullshit I produced in a few minutes. For this reason as well as the others I discussed, I do not think it is appropriate to cite the statements of LLMs as though they constitute evidence.)
For a more pointed example, here’s ChatGPT:
Gosh—that’s just the opposite of what you said! Does this mean you’ve been proven wrong? No, it means I told it to argue that Uniqlo’s clothes have decreased in quality over time and it did, because LLMs will take any position you ask of them regardless of whether or not it’s true.
I don’t assume that all studies that Claude would give me are true. Are there studies that say X is not a good question to ask an LLM if you want to know whether X is true.
It’s common in debate to say even if X, X->Y does not follow. That is not asserting that X is true.
If you ask an LLM it gives you a lot of individual facts in a explanation that help with understanding. It helps with understanding the factors that go into a lot of current fashion being less durable and how those don’t apply to Uniqlo or Mammut for that matter.
You assumed that the studies existed at all. This is not a safe assumption to rely on when you are dealing with LLMs.
With regards to its “help” understanding why Uniqlo didn’t decline, it is, as I demonstrated above, equally good at providing plausible-sounding explanations for why Uniqlo did decline. Here, again, is ChatGPT:
Did you verify what ChatGPT told you before you repeated it as fact?