In particular, if you “get” sports (and programming/CS or math) and want to understand what arts are about, try thinking of it like this: imagine a version of sports where it was actually true that “it doesn’t matter whether you win or lose, but only how you play the game”.
There are ballet competitions and I think parents do care about how their children’s perform in them. The kind of parent that forces their child to play piano every day also cares about performance.
The kind of hacking that Wei Dai did that lead him to write the b-money paper also isn’t about winning. It’s exploring ideas and having fun with them.
Having a kid spent time with computer programming means that he’s much more likely to engage in innovation than having the kid spent time with piano or ballet. Both piano and ballet are heavily codified and don’t encourage innovation.
Most discussions on LessWrong are also not about direct winning but about free exploration. The fact that people spend their free time chatting on LessWrong instead of working for the Man, suggests they already understand that working for the Man isn’t everything.
You seem to have misunderstood my comment as some kind of salvo in a STEM vs. arts rivalry, with the result that your comment reads like a counter-attack in such a battle. This is probably due to cliché-rounding.
In point of fact, a perceived opposition between STEM and arts is a manifestation of the very thing I was complaining about. Thus, to have written the kind of comment that you appear to be responding to would have been the very last of my intentions.
I would direct your attention to the sentence immediately following the excerpt you quoted:
That is, the “standings” did not consist simply of an ordered list (array), but rather a highly complex weighted graph of some sort, that took into account the details of the trajectories of “gameplay”
This, in other words, acknowledges a kind of competitive aspect of art, one more complex than that in (most) sports. Something similar is the case in STEM.
In no sense did I imply that STEM is more “about winning” than art. You seem to be addressing me as if I had said or implied such a thing, which suggests that you simply mis-parsed my comment in that respect.
If I go in a hackerspace I don’t see performance that can be modeled as an ordered list but rather as a highly complex graph.
A ballet competition, on the other hand, does produce an ordered list.
Maybe it would help if we taboo art. What do you mean with the term when ballet and playing the piano are art but the kind of hacking you find at a hackerspace isn’t?
Maybe it would help if we taboo art. What do you mean with the term when ballet and playing the piano are art but the kind of hacking you find at a hackerspace isn’t?
I was not, in fact, using the term in such a way, but you failed to notice this! This is cliché-rounding.
I was not, in fact, using the term in such a way, but you failed to notice this!
The first line of your post is a quote about teaching ballet and piano to children as opposed to the kind of hacking background that Wai Dai has. Why use the term “art” when you don’t mean ballet and piano, without making it explicit that you don’t mean it?
There are ballet competitions and I think parents do care about how their children’s perform in them. The kind of parent that forces their child to play piano every day also cares about performance.
The kind of hacking that Wei Dai did that lead him to write the b-money paper also isn’t about winning. It’s exploring ideas and having fun with them.
Having a kid spent time with computer programming means that he’s much more likely to engage in innovation than having the kid spent time with piano or ballet. Both piano and ballet are heavily codified and don’t encourage innovation.
Most discussions on LessWrong are also not about direct winning but about free exploration. The fact that people spend their free time chatting on LessWrong instead of working for the Man, suggests they already understand that working for the Man isn’t everything.
You seem to have misunderstood my comment as some kind of salvo in a STEM vs. arts rivalry, with the result that your comment reads like a counter-attack in such a battle. This is probably due to cliché-rounding.
In point of fact, a perceived opposition between STEM and arts is a manifestation of the very thing I was complaining about. Thus, to have written the kind of comment that you appear to be responding to would have been the very last of my intentions.
I would direct your attention to the sentence immediately following the excerpt you quoted:
This, in other words, acknowledges a kind of competitive aspect of art, one more complex than that in (most) sports. Something similar is the case in STEM.
In no sense did I imply that STEM is more “about winning” than art. You seem to be addressing me as if I had said or implied such a thing, which suggests that you simply mis-parsed my comment in that respect.
If I go in a hackerspace I don’t see performance that can be modeled as an ordered list but rather as a highly complex graph. A ballet competition, on the other hand, does produce an ordered list.
Maybe it would help if we taboo art. What do you mean with the term when ballet and playing the piano are art but the kind of hacking you find at a hackerspace isn’t?
I was not, in fact, using the term in such a way, but you failed to notice this! This is cliché-rounding.
The first line of your post is a quote about teaching ballet and piano to children as opposed to the kind of hacking background that Wai Dai has. Why use the term “art” when you don’t mean ballet and piano, without making it explicit that you don’t mean it?
I do mean ballet and piano, and also the kind of “the kind of hacking background that Wei Dai has”.
I did not expect this to be completely outside of your hypothesis space, in the way it appears to be. This is worth reflecting on.