Piano and ballet seem like upper-class costly signalling. “I am so rich I can spend tons of time doing unproductive activities.” If you are upper-class and if you want to signal it costly, it could be the right move, otherwise it is almost certainly the wrong move; such is the nature of costly signals.
Sports seem useful per se. Unless you mean golf or pony riding, of course.
Piano and ballet seem like upper-class costly signalling. “I am so rich I can spend tons of time doing unproductive activities.”
Well, no need to speculate about a future Malthusian dystopia, since it appears to be already here, psychologically!
Allow me to refer you to this comment of mine, and the ensuing discussion, on Sarah Constantin’s blog. Artistic pursuits may be “upper-class”, but they are not unproductive. They serve to keep the upper classes practiced in physical cognition, counteracting a tendency to shift entirely into social modes of cognition (gossip and status-signaling games) as one ascends the social ladder. This is very important for the quality of decisions they make as leaders of society. (See here for more on the distinction between physical and social cognition—which, incidentally, I myself would identify with the famous “near” and “far” modes respectively, though not everybody goes along with that.)
The fact that there has been such a decline in interest and participation in high culture among the upper classes is very worrying, and something I would not particularly hesitate to link to the intellectual decadence that we see in general society. (Ever notice how hard it is to engage in reasoning in public? Or the stigmatization—including self-stigmatization—of so-called “nerds”? These are facets of the decadence I’m talking about.)
Now, you refer (rightly, I think) to sports as being “useful”. But sports are just a more primitive version of arts; they are useful for basically the same reason, but require, on average, less intellectual ability and more physical ability. (Cf. this comment of mine on Zack Davis’s blog.) The most interesting of each, of course, are typically somewhat demanding in both ways.
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”. 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”.
If the upper classes strongly favor sports over arts, you’re probably living in a crassly militaristic society like ancient Sparta, Rome, or the 20th-century USA. You don’t usually find the exact opposite, but when arts at least have a strong presence (pre-WWI European powers), your society has a chance at getting interesting things done (e.g. scientific and technological innovation).
The worst situation to be in, however, is where the upper classes stop participating in either, and instead spend all of their time in passive consumption and in gossipy status games; then not only is your society probably headed for collapse, but you won’t even produce much value along the way. (Cf. the fall of Rome, this is where the USA and similar countries now seem headed.)
Now, if you’re thinking “even if true, none of this pertains to the present discussion, because LW readers aren’t part of the upper classes” (which, indeed, is an implication of the parent comment), this is wrong. LW readers are rich programmers; people like Wei Dai and Viliam can pick up the phone (or, more likely, dash off an email) and get themselves a six-figure job starting next week, if somehow they don’t already have one. With this level of resources (distributed in whatever way within a portfolio of financial, social, and intellectual capital), there is no excuse for conceiving oneself at any level below 4 of the Maslow hierarchy. Probably 5, really. No excuse, that is, except for toxic memeplexes spawned by evil egregores, that say that LW readers are destined only to be servants of the Man.
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?
Artistic pursuits may be “upper-class”, but they are not unproductive. They serve to keep the upper classes practiced in physical cognition, counteracting a tendency to shift entirely into social modes of cognition (gossip and status-signaling games) as one ascends the social ladder. This is very important for the quality of decisions they make as leaders of society. (...) The fact that there has been such a decline in interest and participation in high culture among the upper classes is very worrying
Ok, allow me to say it using my own words:
Roughly, human pursuits can be divided into “social games” such as gossip or conspiracies, which are usually zero-sum, or even negative-sum as they often compete in sacrificing to Moloch everything that does not provide immediate social value, and “games with nature” such as work, science, but also sports and that part of art which requires skill e.g. playing the piano (as opposed to “modern art” which is merely about who makes a media hype around you, so it requires allies instead of technical skills). The word “game” is used here as in “game theory”, i.e. it may or may not refer to playful activities.
And there is a risk that when people climb the social ladder, they lose touch with “games with nature”, because they delegate it to people lower than them on the social ladder. With the horrifying consequence that people who rule the world may actually understand it the least. I mean, they certainly understand the social aspects of the world, that’s what they specialize at, so they are good at e.g. organizing a revolution; but they have no idea how to grow grain or cook bread, so the revolution is typically followed by bread shortage and lot of suffering.
Having upper-class people spend some time doing “games with nature” may keep them more sane, and as a result keep the whole society more sane. But, frankly, the “games with nature” are typically motivated, directly or indirectly, by survival (you grow grain and cook bread to avoid starvation, you learn science inter alie to achieve job safety which is to avoid starvation), and this motivation does not apply to the upper class. Having them do sports or (skill-based) art may be the only chance to get them in contact with non-social aspects of reality. Of these two, sports are more about body, and are quite repetitive, while art is more about mind and creativity.
Is this approximately right?
I still think that if someone is doing math or programming, they already have their dose of “games with nature” there. But if a rich programmer has a child that dislikes math and computing… I agree that skill-based art is better than most of the alternatives.
I update that if actual upper-class people want their child to play piano, there may be actually a very healthy instinct behind that. (Or may be just blindly copying what their neighbors do.)
I still think that if someone is doing math or programming, they already have their dose of “games with nature” there.
Of course, but these pursuits themselves are often described as artistic in character, especially by their most elite practitioners.
I update that if actual upper-class people want their child to play piano, there may be actually a very healthy instinct behind that. (Or may be just blindly copying what their neighbors do.)
They probably are copying what their neighbors do, but it is a good fortune if their neighbors happen to do that.
Of course, the effect is dependent on how good the piano instruction is, which is dependent on the level of musical culture of the surrounding society.
Roughly, human pursuits can be divided into “social games” such as gossip or conspiracies, which are usually zero-sum
How do you expect humans to network, figure out who their friends and enemies are, establish trust, etc? “Games with nature” are all fine, but they imply a solitary individual who is an island. Humans are social animals, they build complex social structures and making these structures work necessitates “social games” which are definitely not all zero-sum.
Not to mention that if you want some of your genes to survive into the next generation, you’d better learn to play the appropriate social games :-)
that’s what they specialize at, so they are good at e.g. organizing a revolution; but they have no idea how to grow grain or cook bread
I think you’re getting a bit carried away. Specialization is mostly good. It’s perfectly possible to run a state without having any idea how to bake bread.
frankly, the “games with nature” are typically motivated, directly or indirectly, by survival
So are social games. For most of human history in most cultures, if a society threw you out and shunned you, your chances of survival plummeted.
if actual upper-class people want their child to play piano
I think that “want [the] child to play the piano” and doing art yourself are very different things. I’m much more inclined to buy the argument that sending the child to a music school is all about social signaling for the parents (the child is just being the means) than the argument that someone who does art herself is doing art for social reasons.
The idea is not to ignore “social games” completely, but rather that some people—specifically, upper-class people—are in a risk of going too far, and seeing the world consisting of “social games” only. Mostly because they are liberated from forces that make lower classes play the “games with nature”, such as having to bake your bread or having to keep a job.
Yes, division of labor is a good thing. Problem is, with any division, you need some kind of coordination: whether a person, or an impersonal market. But when you successfully do the revolution, you may kill the competent people and make the market illegal. Then, there may be many people who know how to grow grain and bake bread, but some activities necessary for this process may be made illegal and punished by death. The result is shortage of bread.
The king does not have to know how to make bread, but should not be so insane that he prevents anyone in his kingdom from making bread. And believing e.g. that “objective reality does not exist and everything is socially constructed” seems like a royal road to insanity; but at the same time it is easy to imagine how a person who only ever plays “social games” might find that credible.
It seems like the ideal leisure activities, then, should combine the social games with games against nature. Sports do this to some extent, but the “game against nature” part is mostly physical rather than intellectual.
Maybe we could improve on that. I’m envisioning some sort of combination of programming and lacrosse, where the field reconfigures itself according to the players’ instructions with a 10-second delay...
But more realistically, certain sports are more strategic and intellectual than others. I’ve seen both tennis and fencing mentioned as sports that involve quick strategic thinking and predicting your opponent, although they lack the team element that lets you build coordination skills. Maybe some kind of group fencing would be good… or doubles tennis?
I don’t think knowing how to grow grain and bake bread helps you avoiding to turn a free market economy into a planned economy that mismanages resources.
Mao prohibited farm ownership and no amount of understanding the actual skill of baking or growing crops would have convinced him that private ownership is a good idea.
Lysenko’s success is also not simply about lack of farming knowledge but about having an intellectual climate that’s not well-fitted from separating true theories from those that aren’t.
Mao prohibited farm ownership and no amount of understanding the actual skill of baking or growing crops would have convinced him that private ownership is a good idea.
What makes you so sure of this? More to the point, what makes you sure that a society that tied status more closely to such skills wouldn’t have promoted someone better than Mao to the top?
Lysenko’s success is also not simply about lack of farming knowledge but about having an intellectual climate that’s not well-fitted from separating true theories from those that aren’t.
The point here is to get into the reasons why intellectual climates have the properties they do, with respect to the ability to develop and identify true theories.
To be sure, societies could have multiple failure modes, and I am open to the possibility that the USSR and Maoist China may have been bad for reasons entirely unconnected to the relationship between status and physical cognition. However, the populist character of both makes me doubt this, as populism seems anticorrelated with both good aesthetics and good science.
what makes you sure that a society that tied status more closely to such skills wouldn’t have promoted someone better than Mao to the top?
There have been enough revolutions and (temporarily successful) peasant revolts to demonstrate how that usually turns out. Lenin famously said that “Any cook should be able to run the country” and I don’t think it worked well.
populism seems anticorrelated with both good aesthetics and good science
Thus, by “a society that tied status more closely to such skills”, I do not mean the typical conditions leading to, and resulting from, a peasant revolt.
It’s more complicated :-D Like in French, most Russian nouns have masculine or feminine gender and IIRC in the original Russian the cook was specifically a female cook. And Lenin, sigh, was a cishet white male.
What makes you so sure of this? More to the point, what makes you sure that a society that tied status more closely to such skills wouldn’t have promoted someone better than Mao to the top?
Mao was the son of a farmer. Mao actually worked on his father farm instead of learning the piano and was bullied for his farmer background in high school.
I don’t think good aesthetics tell you about how to grow crops or bake bread.
Sure, but that’s true of most every human activity under the sun (including “games with nature”).
you may kill the competent people and make the market illegal
Knowing NOT to do this is in no way dependent on knowing how to grow wheat or bake bread.
believing e.g. that “objective reality does not exist and everything is socially constructed” seems like a royal road to insanity
I agree, but here the difference between beliefs and aliefs becomes important. Besides, physical reality has a habit of rudely intruding into social constructs and if you still insist on ignoring it, well, you might be in line for a Darwin Award.
They serve to keep the upper classes practiced in physical cognition, counteracting a tendency to shift entirely into social modes of cognition (gossip and status-signaling games) as one ascends the social ladder.
I would describe this more generally as real-world achievement, which is a lot clearer than a label like “physical cognition”. Eric S. Raymond has a nice post which details how the beneficial effects of having a shared standard of achievement can play out socially, at least in the strictly technical realm.
Oh, and by the way, good scholarship can definitely count as legitimate “achievement” in many circumstances. This most likely explains how even the most stereotypical “humanities academia” can sometimes manage to be both intellectually engaging and socially healthy. Yes, there are lots of worrying dynamics in the “X Studies” part of academia, but sometimes good work still happens there.
I would describe this more generally as real-world achievement, which is a lot clearer than a label like “physical cognition”
There you go again, compulsively trying to round concepts off to something else!
“Real-world achievement” is considerably less clear as a way of pointing to what I am trying to point to than “physical cognition”. It evokes all kinds of distracting side-issues about what constitutes the “real world”. (Is pure mathematics “real-world achievement”? et cetera, etcetera).
I can’t tell what the point of your second paragraph is. Is it just an attempt to provide reassurance (to whom?) about the value of humanities academia, in the face of what you took to be a “boo humanities academia!” from me (in my comment on Otium)? Or are you seeking to dispute my contention that physical cognition is underpracticed and undervalued there (in which case it would tend to look like your proposal to substitute “real-world achievement” for “physical cognition” was an attempt to muddy the waters in preparation for an equivocation)?
All this notwithstanding, I’m grateful for the pointer to the Eric Raymond essay, as it is relevant to what I was talking about with respect to Maslow and so forth. (In particular, it serves as anecdotal information about, and confirmation of, the distinction between Levels 4 and 5.)
There you go again, compulsively trying to round concepts off to something else!
Creating a distinct new concept in one’s mind is an expensive operation (with both short term and long term costs), so I think it’s only to be expected that people will try to match a supposedly new concept to an existing one and see if they can get away with just reusing the existing concept. I suggest that if you don’t want people to do that, you should define your new concept as clearly as possible, give lots of both positive and negative examples, explain how it differs from any nearby concepts that people might try to “round off” to, and why it makes sense to organize one’s thinking in terms of the new concept. (It would also help to give it a googleable name so people can find all that information. Right now, Google defines physical cognition as “Physical cognition, or ‘folk physics’, is a common sense understanding of the physical world around us and how different objects interact with each other.” which is obviously not what you’re talking about.)
I think I’ve avoided rounding off your physical cognition to an existing concept, but I still don’t understand how the concept is defined exactly or why it’s a useful way of organizing one’s thinking as it relates to the question of what kinds of children’s activities are most valuable. Clearly there are distinct skills within what you call physical cognition, and all those skills are not equally valuable, nor does practicing one physical cognition skill improve all physical cognition skills equally (e.g., if you practice math skills you improve math skills more than piano skills, and vice versa). Given that, why does it make sense to group a bunch of different skills together into “physical cognition” and then say that practicing piano is valuable because it exercises physical cognition? Wouldn’t it make more sense to talk about exactly what skills are improved by practicing piano, and how valuable the increase of those specific skills are?
Creating a distinct new concept in one’s mind is an expensive operation (with both short term and long term costs), so I think it’s only to be expected that people will try to match a supposedly new concept to an existing one and see if they can get away with just reusing the existing concept.
Right, but I was reacting to a prior history with that particular commenter, who has been especially prone to doing this (very often where, in my view, it isn’t appropriate).
But also: I regard concept-creation as being a large part of what we’re in the business of doing, here. (At least, it’s a large part of what I’m here for.) That’s what theorization is, and I think we’re here to theorize (maybe among other things). So it’s a cost that I think one has signed up to bear in a context of this sort.
For the most part, it’s great if one has the motivation to write up a thorough exposition of a new concept, starting from very elementary premises (although there’s also the negative aspect of potentially reinforcing a norm of this level of effort being generally expected every time one wants to introduce a new concept). However, one doesn’t always have that motivation (or time, etc.), so it should be allowed sometimes to just point and say “look over here; if you think about this for a while, you may traverse the same inferential path I have, which leads to this conclusion.”
Indeed, that’s basically exactly what I want out of this forum: a place where people can state inferentially-distant conclusions you might not hear elsewhere (without necessarily needing to justify them from first principles—such requirements might, after all, be part of why they’re not heard elsewhere!). This, of course, requires a community where a certain amount of epistemic trust has been built up, but I think that happened already (c. 2009-11).
For epistemic norms designed to avoid false positives, there are skeptics’ forums, and scientific journals. And your grandmother (to paraphrase Feynman). Here, we could use more of the opposite approach (avoiding false negatives). Who else specializes in that (high-quality speculation)? It’s basically an empty niche.
Clearly there are distinct skills within what you call physical cognition, and all those skills are not equally valuable
Perhaps I can “strike a chord” with you in particular by talking about value uncertainty in this context. Even to the extent it’s clear that not all of the “subskills” are equally valuable (which I don’t necessarily concede, in part because its not even clear to me what the right decomposition into subskills is!), it’s not necessarily clear which ones are more valuable, and by how much.
To be honest, I’m a little bit suspicious of the whole approach of trying to decompose something like music (or the “physical cognition” involved therein) into its component subskills, with the aim of measuring their relative values. The reason for this is that I doubt anyone currently understands either music, psychology, or ‘values’ well enough to do this—at least, at any level of detail much beyond what I’ve already done by pointing to the physicality of music. To me, the relation between physicality of this sort and certain especially valuable forms of thought (precise, imaginative) is intuitively obvious, and I think consideration and investigation into the matter will reveal this to others; but I don’t think this translates easily into something like “music study trains Cognitive Skill S X% more effectively than [rival activity]”, especially where we can be confident that S is ontologically sound, and X numerically accurate, “enough”.
What is on more solid ground at the moment is the heuristic, correlational case that it is better to be the kind of person who is interested and experienced in things like music than the kind of person who isn’t. And it’s better to live in the kind of society where such pursuits are enjoyed and admired than in the kind where they’re not.
It would be nice to have a more detailed idea of why this is the case—but I think the study of music, and the other activities in this reference class, is itself a conceptual prerequisite for more fully understanding the phenomenon.
However, one doesn’t always have that motivation (or time, etc.), so it should be allowed sometimes to just point and say “look over here; if you think about this for a while, you may traverse the same inferential path I have, which leads to this conclusion.”
I don’t think that’s a reasonable expectation or norm. The expected return from a reader doing something like that is way too low, even in a community like this one. Most new ideas are wrong, and if your idea is wrong then people trying to traverse the same inferential path will get nowhere, and not even know if its their own fault or not. If you write it down then people can figure out where you went wrong and point it out. Even if your idea is right and your reader can be sure of that, why shouldn’t you write an good explanation once, which will then save time for potentially hundreds or thousands of readers? By trying to save that time for yourself, you cause other people to waste their time, and then you end up having to answer their confusions and perhaps not even save time for yourself.
You could make an exception to this if you just had a new idea and you want to find out if anyone else already had a similar idea or can see an obvious flaw in it, before deciding to invest more time into explaining it fully, but that doesn’t seem to be what you’re doing here.
Perhaps I can “strike a chord” with you in particular by talking about value uncertainty in this context. Even to the extent it’s clear that not all of the “subskills” are equally valuable (which I don’t necessarily concede, in part because its not even clear to me what the right decomposition into subskills is!), it’s not necessarily clear which ones are more valuable, and by how much.
I have some uncertainty here, but not that much. I took one semester of piano and one semester of electronic music in high school, and it was intuitively clear that the return from that time spent wasn’t nearly as valuable as say reading science fiction or economics textbooks. There’s obviously a lot of individual differences here, so if my kid naturally has an interest or talent in music or art and wants to study it, I’m not going to stop her. But if your position is that we should more vigorously encourage an interest in artistic pursuits, I’m going to need more evidence and/or better arguments.
To me, the relation between physicality of this sort and certain especially valuable forms of thought (precise, imaginative) is intuitively obvious, and I think consideration and investigation into the matter will reveal this to others;
This is totally unclear to me. I guess even if it’s true, it would be hard for me to figure out on my own since I probably haven’t studied music enough to be familiar with the kind of “physicality” that you’re talking about. Nor do I understand what forms of thought you’re suggesting is related to such physicality. “Precise, imaginative” is pretty vague.
What is on more solid ground at the moment is the heuristic, correlational case that it is better to be the kind of person who is interested and experienced in things like music than the kind of person who isn’t. And it’s better to live in the kind of society where such pursuits are enjoyed and admired than in the kind where they’re not.
I agree with the latter, but I think it’s just because in every society there will be some people who naturally enjoy artistic pursuits and almost everyone at least enjoy consuming art, so if art isn’t being enjoyed and admired, something must have gone terribly wrong to have caused that. On an individual level, such a correlation, if it exists, can be easily explained by the fact that “better” people have more resources available to pursue artistic interests. Again if you’re making the case that artistic pursuits cause people to become better (compared to other pursuits they could spend the time on), you’ll have to give more evidence and/or better arguments.
The expected return from a reader doing something like that is way too low, even in a community like this one. Most new ideas are wrong, and if your idea is wrong then people trying to traverse the same inferential path will get nowhere
I disagree with these statements. (Even in the case of “most new ideas are wrong”, I would ADBOC.)
You’re basically just stating the view that “false positives are a bigger problem than false negatives”, which I already disagreed with explicitly (as applied to this context) in my previous comment.
why shouldn’t you write an good explanation
Because what constitutes a “good explanation” is strongly reader-dependent, and I don’t have good enough models of most readers to know in advance what will satisfy them. It’s worth it to try being very foundational sometimes, but not all the time. It’s also worth it for readers to sometimes practice the skill of traversing inferential paths more nimbly.
if your position is that we should more vigorously encourage an interest in artistic pursuits
I wouldn’t presume to take such a detailed position on how you should relate to your child. (Though I can think of someone you might want to talk to, about not only this but the whole subject of “what to do” with children who are, or who are at “risk” of being, “gifted”—the best way to get into contact with that person would probably be through Jonah Sinick.)
My concern here is only to explain (insofar as is possible within the number of words I’m willing to expend) something about what the value of traditional artistic pursuits is, and, in particular, the ways in which it’s similar to the value of less traditional artistic pursuits like programming. I think you (like many, no doubt, in the LW audience) have bad priors about this due to insufficient exposure in early life (perhaps for socioeconomic reasons—as you said above, “My parents didn’t have the time or money to deliberately cultivate these kinds of interests in me when I was a child). I myself also had relatively little deliberate exposure (for the same reasons), but, exceptionally, was drawn in the relevant direction by an unusually strong intrinsic attraction (such that, had I come from an upper-class background, I would very likely have been involved at a much higher level much earlier). As a result, I think I am in the position of perceiving something about this that most LW readers are probably missing (insofar as they seem to want to reduce interest in these pursuits, implicitly and even explicitly, as we’ve seen here, to some kind of mere class signal—indeed, a form of conspicuous consumption).
There is a kind of pleasure, when one performs a complex movement “just so”, that attracts some people to e.g. martial arts without the goal of learning to defend themselves. (It was so with me, but, well, socioeconomic reasons.) There’s a kind of a message that some people get out of poetry, besides the ‘prosaic sense’ of it, which sometimes gets related in another piece of poetry or even a very different way. I used to wonder, what exactly is its impact on different people’s understanding of the whole, & might not ‘understanding’ be an umbrella word for some orthogonal things… Some of which get called ‘spiritual’ for lack of a better term:)
“Real-world achievement” is considerably less clear as a way of pointing to what I am trying to point to than “physical cognition”. It evokes all kinds of distracting side-issues about what constitutes the “real world”. (Is pure mathematics “real-world achievement”? et cetera, et cetera).
For me, I don’t see how “physical cognition” is better, because just what “physical” means here is as unclear to me as what “real-world” means in bogus’s comment, and in rather similar ways. Is doing pure mathematics “physical cognition”? What about physics?
With no more context than your earlier comment where (so far as I know) you first used the term, I’d have taken “physical cognition” to mean something like “applying one’s brain directly to the real world in ways involving planning and subtlety and the like”, with playing a musical instrument being an example. But I now have the impression that you intend it more broadly than that, perhaps including e.g. musical composition (even if done in one’s head). But exactly what you mean remains unclear to me, as does why (if I’m understanding you right) you consider “physical cognition” a more fruitful category of things to lump together than “real-world achievement”.
(Note for the avoidance of doubt: I am not claiming that “physical cognition” is not a more fruitful category, nor that bogus’s thinking in this area is better than yours, nor anything of that kind. I am just saying that it seems unreasonable to complain of someone “rounding off concepts” when you have made no apparent effort to clarify what you do mean, and that your specific objection to “real-world achievement” seems to apply equally to “physical cognition”.)
With no more context than your earlier comment where (so far as I know) you first used the term
[...]
I am just saying that it seems unreasonable to complain of someone “rounding off concepts” when you have made no apparent effort to clarify what you do mean
In my original comment, I linked to the essay that was the source of the concepts of “physical” and “social cognition” as I used them in that comment. Without the context of that essay, there is no reason to expect my remarks in this discussion to be intelligible.
OK. Then I have a confession and three complaints. The confession is that when I wrote what I did above, I hadn’t noticed that you offered that link as further explanation of the term “physical cognition”. The complaints are (1) that having now followed the link, I think it leaves the meaning of “physical cognition” still less than perfectly clear; and, in so far as it does explain what the term means, (2a) it actually seems not so far from “real-world achievement” and (2b) I think it probably doesn’t include music and art. (Whereas in your usage it seems like it must.)
I’ll elaborate a bit. Here is what that essay says about physical and social cognition. (The only actual instance of those terms is at the end of the second quoted paragraph, but I think the preceding stuff is necessary to make sense of that.)
Maslow suggests that at one level of description a human consists of five programs. One escapes immediate danger, one seeks comfort and physical security, one finds a social context in which to be embedded, one builds esteem within that context, and one directs big-picture intentionality. As a general rule, when a given program reports satisfaction the next program is turned on and starts competing in its more subtle game.
Some of those programs allocate attention to things that can be understood fairly rigorously, like a cart, a plow, or a sword. Other programs allocate attention to more complicated things, such as the long-term alliances and reproductive opportunities within a tribe. The former programs might involve situational awareness and detailed planning, while the latter programs might operate via subtle and tacit pattern detection and automatic obedience to crude heuristics. If so, the latter programs might be fairly easily hacked. They might also offer a less fertile ground for the emergence of a Universal Turing Machine. Mechanical metaphors of solidity and shape might constitute a good substrate for digital, and thus potentially abstract cognition, while social metaphors for continuous and vague properties like weirdness, gravitas and sexiness might constitute a poor foundation for universal cognition. These programs seem to have been disfavored by history’s great scientific innovators, who tend to make statements like “I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the sea-shore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble...” or “What do you care what other people think”, which sound like endorsements of physical over social cognition.
So. We start with Maslow’s hierarchy. Vassar (the author of the essay) puts a division between the two “lowest” levels, which he calls “physical” (meaning that they are concerned with our physical needs and wants) and the next two, which he calls “social” (meaning that they are concerned with our interactions with others). The topmost level (“self-actualization”) I think Vassar classifies as “social”, which I think mostly indicates that his terminology isn’t great.
And he says that attempts to address needs and wants higher up in the Maslow hierarchy tend to involve vague fuzzy socailly-mediated things, which may “be fairly easily hacked” and “constitute a poor foundation for universal cognition” by comparison with activity directed at the lower levels, which tend to involve precise specific details and “constitute a good substrate for digital, and thus potentially abstract, cognition”. And, finally, he says that the lower-level ones seem to be endorsed over the higher-level by the likes of Newton and Feynman.
All fair enough (though I’m not at all convinced). But now you want to say that artistic endeavour belongs in the category of “physical cognition”? Really? Perhaps the purely mechanical aspects of playing an instrument do, but what distinguishes music from finger exercises is vague fuzzy socially-mediated things like “beauty” and “taste” which seem to me much more like “weirdness, gravitas and sexiness” than like “solidity and shape”, and which I think land squarely in the category of “social cognition” according to Vassar’s distinction.
My point (2a) is less important than (2b) which is why I’ve focused on the latter, but now a word or two about (2a). If I am understanding Vassar right, what distinguishes “physical cognition” is that its goals are located in the physical world and can be evaluated without reference to social context (moral norms, fashions, the approval of the elite, …). And if I am understanding bogus right, this is pretty close to what he means by “real-world”. Not quite the same, but closer (as it seems to me) than anything that would put artistic endeavours in the “physical” category.
Like others, you seem to be interpreting my comments as if they were stating conclusions intended to be only one or two inferential steps away (from your current epistemic state). This is not at all necessarily the case!
In particular, when I state a proposition X, I expect readers not only to ask themselves whether they already think X is true (i.e. conditioned on all their knowledge before my statement), but also to ask themselves why I might believe X. To engage, in other words, in at least a cursory search for inferential chains leading to X—resulting in either the discovery of an inferential chain that they themselves agree with (in which case communication has been approximately successful), or a hypothesis about what my error is (which can then be discussed, and confirmed or disconfirmed).
This mental motion seems to be missing from your (and, even more severely, others’) reactions to my comments. It’s as if I were expected to be modeling your epistemic state, without any corresponding expectation that you be modeling mine. Yet, insofar as I’ve stated a specific belief, you have some specific information about mine, whereas I have only background information about yours. This will of course change once you reply—I will get more specific information about yours—but the dialogue will be more efficient if your reply attempts to integrate and respond to the information you have about my epistemic state, rather than merely providing information about yours (as is the case when your reply takes the form “you have made one or more assumptions that I don’t share”, as here, for example).
Now, to get back to the object level:
Vassar (the author of the essay) puts a division between the two “lowest” levels, which he calls “physical” (meaning that they are concerned with our physical needs and wants) and the next two, which he calls “social” (meaning that they are concerned with our interactions with others). The topmost level (“self-actualization”) I think Vassar classifies as “social”, which I think mostly indicates that his terminology isn’t great.
You have overlooked a distinction that, while not explicitly stated in the essay itself, is nevertheless crucial to understanding the point Vassar is making: the distinction between people’s needs, themselves, and the programs that they use to satisfy them. The pathology that Vassar is complaining about is the fact that as one ascends the hierarchy of needs, the programs that people tend to use for satisfying them become less physical and more social in nature: society in effect reserves its highest rewards for those most practiced in social, rather than physical, cognition. The essay implies that he regards this as being, in at least some sense, contingent: in principle, society could be set up so that physical cognition played a greater role in the satisfaction of higher Maslow-needs (belonging, esteem, self-actualization).
This is the background for my assertions about art—which I made first not here, but on Sarah Constantin’s blog Otium, in a comment thread that, again, I linked in my original comment here (and is thus assumed to be fully loaded into the context of this discussion):
[T]here’s a widespread misunderstanding to the effect that the “finer things in life” (art etc., particularly as contrasted with STEM) fall exclusively into the realm of social cognition; and this is just so, so, so, false. I feel like a whole array of cultural pathologies can be traced to this misunderstanding...
This could even have existential implications of a sort...the problem is — and this is what Michael was talking about in his essay — that society doesn’t reward physical cognition with Maslow-advancement. As a result, by the time people get up to Level 5, their focus has basically shifted to social cognition, and they “enjoy the finer things in life” in predominantly if not exclusively that way. As a result, they are cognitively unequipped to do the very things that people on Level 5 are supposed to be doing (“figuring out where the monkey tribe should go next”, i.e. solving x-risk etc.), or at least unpracticed...
I basically feel that if we, as a society, understood better that art (at least certain forms, most notably music) was just as much about physical cognition as social (and basically as much about physical as STEM is), that would at least reflect (and could even cause) a stronger presence of physical cognition along the gradient of social advancement.
So: from this it should be evident that not only do I think that certain arts are heavily physical-cognition-loaded, but, furthermore, the very failure to understand this is, in my view, itself a manifestation of the pathology that Vassar’s essay was (in large part) about.
(Just as an aside: in case there is any doubt about my interpretation of Vassar, here is an e-mail I wrote to him in March 2013:
Dear Michael,
I’m wondering if you think the following is a fair paraphrase of your Edge essay from January:
To effectively create value requires skill in analytical/”near-mode” thinking. Unfortunately, society does not do a good job of Maslow-rewarding people for developing such skill, with the result that too few people at the higher Maslow-levels are analytically skilled, and too few analytically skilled people are at the higher Maslow-levels.
This seems like precisely the problem that the rationalist community exists in order to address. [...]
To which he replied, in full:
That’s the main point of the essay.
)
Thus, I think it was somewhat logically rude of you to ask, in a tone of incredulity,
But now you want to say that artistic endeavour belongs in the category of “physical cognition”? Really?
and to follow that by an un-self-conscious affirmation of the conventional assumption that I had, very knowingly, denied.
“Really?” Yes, really. Not only am I aware that conventional wisdom assumes the contrary, but I specifically cited the conventionality of that assumption as an example of the Maslow-pathology described by Vassar. Yes, I know people think that
what distinguishes music from finger exercises is vague fuzzy socially-mediated things like “beauty” and “taste” which seem to me much more like “weirdness, gravitas and sexiness” than like “solidity and shape”
-- this (I claim) is a problem!
Now, it’s understandable that you might be curious about why I believe what I believe in this realm. And, to a large extent, I’m perfectly happy to discuss it. (After all, on my beliefs, it’s in my interest to do so!) But the inferential chains may be long, and my communication style is a high-context one. Even if I have made a mistake in my reasoning, it is not likely to be identified efficiently by means of a discussion that takes it as plausible that I might have arrived at my conclusions randomly.
the programs that people tend to use for satisfying them become less physical and more social in nature: society in effect reserves its highest rewards for those most practiced in social, rather than physical, cognition. The essay implies that he regards this as being, in at least some sense, contingent: in principle, society could be set up so that physical cognition played a greater role in the satisfaction of higher Maslow-needs
It seems hard to envision a society wherein belonging and esteem could be satisfied via physical cognition, at least until we can make building an AIBO pet dog robot in one’s garage a common enough pasttime. So, the only realistic possibility for a meaningful change is in how self-actualization is pursued. But is it actually true that “social” paths to self-actualization are less collectively desirable than “physical” paths to the same? Well, for a start, there are certainly “fine things in life” that are best understood in social terms; for a handy example that fits squarely in the realm of art, consider so-called “literary” fiction. Now I obviously cannot claim that writing literary fiction could ever be considered an “achievement” of the purest sort (in my preferred sense), since its value is not something that can be generally assessed in any widely-agreed upon way. And yet, it is certainly the case that, to the extent that works of literary fiction are widely considered to be valuable accomplishments, this is due to what they imply about the social universe, as opposed to the physical one!
The belief that I am implicitly denying here seems to be, as quoted directly from the parent comment: “To effectively create value requires skill in analytical/”near-mode” thinking” (emphasis added). And that’s certainly true in many cases (it’s also true, as you rightly point out, that many of the “finer things in life” are far from entirely social!) but not in general. This matters here, because it seems to lead you to incorrect conclusions about what exactly makes “self-actualization” value-creating and collectively desirable. It’s not the absence of “social cognition” in its entirety but rather, of a few undesirable aspects of social interaction that are rather more pervasive at the level of “esteem” and “belonging”. Vassar’s essay is even quite clear that these aspects exist, and are important to his point!
It seems hard to envision a society wherein belonging and esteem could be satisfied via physical cognition
Not hard to envision at all; only hard, perhaps, to implement. It shouldn’t take all that much imagination to summon the thought of a society in which people were better rewarded with status (and all its trappings) for things like solving mathematical problems, or composing complexly-structured music, as opposed to all the various generalized forms of pure politics that determine the lion’s share of status in the world we know, than they actually are in the world we know.
In fact, we can look around and find historical examples of societies where that was the case. In my Otium comment I pointed to one: Imperial Germany (pre-WWI). That was a place where a figure like Max Reger could achieve high status in general culture—without even needing to be a Nietzschean superman to do so. All he had to do was follow the rules of society, which happened to permit someone with those kinds of compositional aspirations to become a celebrity.
My radical belief is that the fact that this is the same culture that also produced leading figures in every other field of creative intellection (and a place where shops in university towns sold pictures of professors in postcard form), and indeed is credited by Tyler Cowen with “deliver[ing] the goods in terms of innovation”, is not a coincidence.
This is an extreme example—in fact the best I know of, at least at the level of entire nations—but the phenomenon is a matter of degree.
Well, for a start, there are certainly “fine things in life” that are best understood in social terms; for a handy example that fits squarely in the realm of art, consider so-called “literary” fiction.
Yes. Narrative fiction is the least physically-oriented of the arts. Its existence is most of the reason for the qualifier “at least certain forms [of art]” in my comment on Sarah’s blog.
Note that it is also the only art-form that is widely appreciated at anything like a sophisticated level by the “rationalist community” as a whole. This is a problem. (Basically, it reflects an implicit belief that only STEM is about physical cognition; since all art is assumed to be almost wholly social, LWers opt for the “least pretentious” variant, i.e. the most socioculturally “accessible” form to them, namely fiction, specifically fanfiction.)
It’s not the absence of “social cognition” in its entirety
I never said it was. What made you think otherwise?
Above, I specifically said that arts synthesized physical and social cognition, and implied that that was important to their value.
The problem I’m talking about is the absence of physical cognition, not the presence of social cognition.
There you go again, compulsively trying to round concepts off to something else!
“Real-world achievement” is considerably less clear as a way of pointing to what I am trying to point to than “physical cognition”.
It would be helpful if you try to define what you mean with “art” or “physical cognition” if you see people thinking you mean something different than you do.
Or are you seeking to dispute my contention that physical cognition is underpracticed and undervalued there[]?
Nope. More formally, I’m saying that the relation between the “physical” nature of cognition and the social benefits you talk about is essentially screened off by the more immediate fact that such physical activities are far more likely to feature a widely-agreed standard of achievement. Thus, the fact that humanities scholarship is in some sense “non-physical” (which it obviously is, since it is properly about human cultures, as opposed to physical phenomena such as the mechanics of playing an instrument) is practically irrelevant to whether or not we should consider it to be “intellectually stimulating”, at least inasmuch as the merit of such scholarship is sometimes widely agreed upon.
It evokes all kinds of distracting side-issues about what constitutes the “real world”. (Is pure mathematics “real-world achievement”? et cetera, et cetera
To some extent, these issues seem to be unavoidable. One reason why pure math academia is in such a “bad” shape socially is that it is only directly valued by a tiny minority. Within the subculture that values it, though, achievement is reasonably clear and thus it can at least escape the negative connotations of “social cognition”. A similar situation seems to apply in newly-composed “serious” music, even though the subculture that values that might be even smaller, and the standard of “what makes this new piece worthwhile enough that I should be paying attention to it” somewhat less than clear.
Upper class folks don’t spend all their time in consumption and gossip, with art as their only lifeline to the real world. They do business and politics as well.
Artistic pursuits may be “upper-class”, but they are not unproductive. They serve to keep the upper classes practiced in physical cognition, counteracting a tendency to shift entirely into social modes of cognition (gossip and status-signaling games) as one ascends the social ladder.
I’m having trouble understanding this. Why do artistic pursuits constitute practice in physical cognition as opposed to social cognition? It seems obvious to me that artistic pursuits are (among other things) a type of status signaling, so I’m confused why you’re contrasting the two. Please explain?
With this level of resources (distributed in whatever way within a portfolio of financial, social, and intellectual capital), there is no excuse for conceiving oneself at any level below 4 of the Maslow hierarchy. Probably 5, really.
(Aside from not being sure how valid the Maslow hierarchy is) I agree with this. But I don’t see art/music/dance classes as a particularly good way to prepare most kids to fulfill their level 4 and 5 needs, mostly because there is too much competition from other parents pushing their kids into artistic pursuits. The amount of talent, time, and effort needed to achieve recognition or a feeling of accomplishment seem too high, compared to other possible pursuits.
Aside from not being sure how valid the Maslow hierarchy is
Basically, Maslow’s hierarchy of needs is a myth, and everyone would be better off forgetting about it entirely.
… critics point to dozens of counter-examples. What about the famished poet? Or the person who withdraws from society to become a hermit? Or the mountaineer who disregards safety in his determination to reach the summit?
Muddying things slightly, Maslow said that for some people, needs may appear in a different order or be absent altogether. Moreover, people felt a mix of needs from different levels at any one time, but they varied in degree.
There is a further problem with Maslow’s work. Margie Lachman, a psychologist who works in the same office as Maslow at his old university, Brandeis in Massachusetts, admits that her predecessor offered no empirical evidence for his theory. “He wanted to have the grand theory, the grand ideas—and he wanted someone else to put it to the hardcore scientific test,” she says. “It never quite materialised.”
However, after Maslow’s death in 1970, researchers did undertake a more detailed investigation, with attitude-based surveys and field studies testing out the Hierarchy of Needs.
“When you analyse them, the five needs just don’t drop out,” says Hodgkinson. “The actual structure of motivation doesn’t fit the theory. And that led to a lot of discussion and debate, and new theories evolved as a consequence.”
Basically, Maslow’s hierarchy of needs is a myth, and everyone would be better off forgetting about it entirely.
Not necessarily; it depends on what one’s default or alternative theory would be. Let’s be Bayesian, after all.
As I interpret it, “Maslow’s hierarchy of needs” is little more than the claim that people’s goals depend on their internal sense of security and status (in addition to whatever else they might depend on).
When I speak about it, I’m usually talking about something like a spectrum of exogenous vs. endogenous motivation: at one end you have someone being chased by a wild animal (thus maximally influenced by the environment), and at the other, the Nietzschean “superhuman” who lives only according to their own values, rather than channeling or being a tool of anyone or anything else (thus minimally influenced by the environment in some sense, although obviously everything is ultimately a product of some external force).
Not necessarily; it depends on what one’s default or alternative theory would be.
Self-determination theory is the standard alternative theory I usually point to (which also incorporates the spectrum of exogenous vs. endogenous motivation, but which I don’t think the hierarchy of needs as usually conceived does).
Thanks for the link; that’ll be useful to refer to.
Of course, I on the contrary do think the hierarchy of needs is suggestive of this, as evidenced by the fact that I specifically interpreted it that way!
It’s certainly not a myth because it’s a theory (or a hypothesis) which actually exists. Its weak forms are rather obvious, famished poets notwithstanding. Psychology is not physics and should not pretend to be physics, it deals in weak generalizations and fuzzy conclusions. Maslow’s hierarchy should not be thought of as an iron law which applies everywhere to everyone—it’s merely a framework for thinking about needs.
Psychology is not physics and should not pretend to be physics, it deals in weak generalizations and fuzzy conclusions.
Sure, but we’re talking about a theory that isn’t even accepted as a psychological theory: psychologists themselves have examined it, decided there was no reason to believe in it, and moved on.
Why do artistic pursuits constitute practice in physical cognition as opposed to social cognition? It seems obvious to me that artistic pursuits are (among other things) a type of status signaling, so I’m confused why you’re contrasting the two
Artistic pursuits involve a synthesis of physical and social cognition. (This is essential to their nature and is what makes them special among human activities.) There is certainly a social aspect, but it’s crucial that that isn’t all there is. That there is also a physical aspect is also pretty obvious, if you consider what is involved in playing an instrument, for example—but importantly, it goes beyond that, to encompass the ways one thinks about something like music (in terms of motion, as well as ideas like connectedness, and so on).
Generally speaking, whenever we think of something as being “technical”, we’re talking about the involvement of physical cognition. Art is social, yes, but it is also highly technical.
Many people, unfortunately, underappreciate the physical, or technical, side of artistic thought. This is what I was warning against in my comments on Otium.
The amount of talent, time, and effort needed to achieve recognition or a feeling of accomplishment seem too high, compared to other possible pursuits.
This is actually not really true, but it’s understandable that you might perceive it that way. Even so, the time and effort are part of the point: anything fulfilling this role has to involve extensive amounts of interaction with the objects or processes in question.
Generally speaking, whenever we think of something as being “technical”, we’re talking about the involvement of physical cognition. Art is social, yes, but it is also highly technical.
For certain arts—e.g. music—this is true (in the sense in which I understand “physical cognition”—the body is intimately involved). But a counter-example would be something like digital art where your tools are on Photoshop palettes. The physical skill involved is moving a mouse and I don’t think this qualifies. And yet, digital art is highly “technical”.
Generally speaking, whenever we think of something as being “technical”, we’re talking about the involvement of physical cognition. Art is social, yes, but it is also highly technical.
(in the sense in which I understand “physical cognition”—the body is intimately involved
That is not what I meant—as the excerpt you quoted was intended to communicate.
Musical composition is one of the archetypal instances of a physical-cognition-loaded activity (in the sense that I mean), and yet there your physical tools are a pencil/pen and paper (or, sometimes, indeed, a mouse).
These programs seem to have been disfavored by history’s great scientific innovators, who tend to make statements like “I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the sea-shore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble...” or “What do you care what other people think”, which sound like endorsements of physical over social cognition.
For some reason, it’s not overly surprising to me that both Isaac Newton and Richard Feynman would directly endorse physical cognition—what with them being natural philosophers/physicists. It’s less clear however that such “physical cognition” is directly relevant to e.g. music composition, except inasmuch as both physics and music composition are linked to self-actualization—as opposed to ‘mere’ love, belonging and self-esteem, which (if pursued in excess, due to a lack of “self-actualizing” pursuits) might “lead[] to increased unethical behavior” or “produce anti-social narcissism” according to the essay you link to.
Wow that seems overly dismissive of the arts. My daughter loves ballet ever since she saw a friends ballet birthday party. She is a very physical / body oriented learning type who fidgets at school. Ballet is a great outlet, builds coordination and gives her self confidence. I know I can say similar things of piano lessons. I quite shocked that you can reduce that to “upper-class costly signaling.”
Sure, costly signaling has to be a big part of any analysis, but isn’t sports also a costly and unproductive way of signaling one’s physical and genetic fitness? Sports can also be a fun way of exercising, but some kids find ballet fun and it can also be good exercise. People have claimed various (non-signaling) benefits of learning to play an instrument as well, and that can also be an enjoyable activity for some.
Apparently some parents make their kids take lessons to increase the chances of getting into private school, and eventually an elite college, so another big part of the analysis might be the costs/benefits of private vs public school and elite vs non-elite colleges. (I personally went to public school and a state university.) Another big part is, if you leave a kid a lot of free time, how likely is it they’ll eventually find something valuable to do with it? Or alternatively, what are some more valuable activities we should try to guide a child into instead of the standard ones?
Elite colleges generally students who are “genuinely” (insert adjectives here), not yet another honor roll student with a boring essay about how their voluntourism trip to Africa changed their life. In a competitive field like that, you want to stand out, and you stand out a lot more by doing something that both clearly signals being good at things and is different from the signals that other students are sending.
Therefore, doing whatever other students of your socio-economic status do is a bad strategy. Much better to do something impressive and different.
It’s not like your kid can opt out of signalling. There’s lots of aspects of the value of these activities, and demonstration of talent, conscientiousness, and the right kind of conforming excellence can be a large part of what you and the kid gets out of it.
Bonus if they also get some excercise, practice and encouragement of good habits along the way.
Sure, but are the standard activities actually optimal even for this purpose? For example I learned to program as a kid, then in college wrote one of the first open source cryptography libraries, after which I had my pick of job offers. I probably put less total hours into this than someone who practiced piano for an hour a day from age 5, and got more out of it. But I’m not sure if that was luck, or if I can expect my own kid to duplicate this.
Also, now that learning to program has become a standard activity that parents push kids into (just look at how many tablet games there are that purport to teach kids how to program), it probably doesn’t have as much signaling or practical value due to competition, and I’m wondering what is the modern equivalent of learning to program as a kid in the 80s.
what is the modern equivalent of learning to program as a kid in the 80s.
Cryptocurrency investment. Imagine how your kid’s peers will be impressed to hear “when I was at elementary school, I put my pocket money in various altcoins, and… long story short, I am a billionaire now”. :D
But maybe learning to program is the modern equivalent of learning to program. Just because there are many tablet games teaching kids how to build “a loop in a loop” programs from predefined blocks, doesn’t mean that kids will bother to play the games, and will move to further stages of programming.
Piano and ballet seem like upper-class costly signalling. “I am so rich I can spend tons of time doing unproductive activities.” If you are upper-class and if you want to signal it costly, it could be the right move, otherwise it is almost certainly the wrong move; such is the nature of costly signals.
Sports seem useful per se. Unless you mean golf or pony riding, of course.
Well, no need to speculate about a future Malthusian dystopia, since it appears to be already here, psychologically!
Allow me to refer you to this comment of mine, and the ensuing discussion, on Sarah Constantin’s blog. Artistic pursuits may be “upper-class”, but they are not unproductive. They serve to keep the upper classes practiced in physical cognition, counteracting a tendency to shift entirely into social modes of cognition (gossip and status-signaling games) as one ascends the social ladder. This is very important for the quality of decisions they make as leaders of society. (See here for more on the distinction between physical and social cognition—which, incidentally, I myself would identify with the famous “near” and “far” modes respectively, though not everybody goes along with that.)
The fact that there has been such a decline in interest and participation in high culture among the upper classes is very worrying, and something I would not particularly hesitate to link to the intellectual decadence that we see in general society. (Ever notice how hard it is to engage in reasoning in public? Or the stigmatization—including self-stigmatization—of so-called “nerds”? These are facets of the decadence I’m talking about.)
Now, you refer (rightly, I think) to sports as being “useful”. But sports are just a more primitive version of arts; they are useful for basically the same reason, but require, on average, less intellectual ability and more physical ability. (Cf. this comment of mine on Zack Davis’s blog.) The most interesting of each, of course, are typically somewhat demanding in both ways.
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”. 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”.
If the upper classes strongly favor sports over arts, you’re probably living in a crassly militaristic society like ancient Sparta, Rome, or the 20th-century USA. You don’t usually find the exact opposite, but when arts at least have a strong presence (pre-WWI European powers), your society has a chance at getting interesting things done (e.g. scientific and technological innovation).
The worst situation to be in, however, is where the upper classes stop participating in either, and instead spend all of their time in passive consumption and in gossipy status games; then not only is your society probably headed for collapse, but you won’t even produce much value along the way. (Cf. the fall of Rome, this is where the USA and similar countries now seem headed.)
Now, if you’re thinking “even if true, none of this pertains to the present discussion, because LW readers aren’t part of the upper classes” (which, indeed, is an implication of the parent comment), this is wrong. LW readers are rich programmers; people like Wei Dai and Viliam can pick up the phone (or, more likely, dash off an email) and get themselves a six-figure job starting next week, if somehow they don’t already have one. With this level of resources (distributed in whatever way within a portfolio of financial, social, and intellectual capital), there is no excuse for conceiving oneself at any level below 4 of the Maslow hierarchy. Probably 5, really. No excuse, that is, except for toxic memeplexes spawned by evil egregores, that say that LW readers are destined only to be servants of the Man.
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.
Ok, allow me to say it using my own words:
Roughly, human pursuits can be divided into “social games” such as gossip or conspiracies, which are usually zero-sum, or even negative-sum as they often compete in sacrificing to Moloch everything that does not provide immediate social value, and “games with nature” such as work, science, but also sports and that part of art which requires skill e.g. playing the piano (as opposed to “modern art” which is merely about who makes a media hype around you, so it requires allies instead of technical skills). The word “game” is used here as in “game theory”, i.e. it may or may not refer to playful activities.
And there is a risk that when people climb the social ladder, they lose touch with “games with nature”, because they delegate it to people lower than them on the social ladder. With the horrifying consequence that people who rule the world may actually understand it the least. I mean, they certainly understand the social aspects of the world, that’s what they specialize at, so they are good at e.g. organizing a revolution; but they have no idea how to grow grain or cook bread, so the revolution is typically followed by bread shortage and lot of suffering.
Having upper-class people spend some time doing “games with nature” may keep them more sane, and as a result keep the whole society more sane. But, frankly, the “games with nature” are typically motivated, directly or indirectly, by survival (you grow grain and cook bread to avoid starvation, you learn science inter alie to achieve job safety which is to avoid starvation), and this motivation does not apply to the upper class. Having them do sports or (skill-based) art may be the only chance to get them in contact with non-social aspects of reality. Of these two, sports are more about body, and are quite repetitive, while art is more about mind and creativity.
Is this approximately right?
I still think that if someone is doing math or programming, they already have their dose of “games with nature” there. But if a rich programmer has a child that dislikes math and computing… I agree that skill-based art is better than most of the alternatives.
I update that if actual upper-class people want their child to play piano, there may be actually a very healthy instinct behind that. (Or may be just blindly copying what their neighbors do.)
Probably close enough for present purposes.
Of course, but these pursuits themselves are often described as artistic in character, especially by their most elite practitioners.
They probably are copying what their neighbors do, but it is a good fortune if their neighbors happen to do that.
Of course, the effect is dependent on how good the piano instruction is, which is dependent on the level of musical culture of the surrounding society.
How do you expect humans to network, figure out who their friends and enemies are, establish trust, etc? “Games with nature” are all fine, but they imply a solitary individual who is an island. Humans are social animals, they build complex social structures and making these structures work necessitates “social games” which are definitely not all zero-sum.
Not to mention that if you want some of your genes to survive into the next generation, you’d better learn to play the appropriate social games :-)
I think you’re getting a bit carried away. Specialization is mostly good. It’s perfectly possible to run a state without having any idea how to bake bread.
So are social games. For most of human history in most cultures, if a society threw you out and shunned you, your chances of survival plummeted.
I think that “want [the] child to play the piano” and doing art yourself are very different things. I’m much more inclined to buy the argument that sending the child to a music school is all about social signaling for the parents (the child is just being the means) than the argument that someone who does art herself is doing art for social reasons.
The idea is not to ignore “social games” completely, but rather that some people—specifically, upper-class people—are in a risk of going too far, and seeing the world consisting of “social games” only. Mostly because they are liberated from forces that make lower classes play the “games with nature”, such as having to bake your bread or having to keep a job.
Yes, division of labor is a good thing. Problem is, with any division, you need some kind of coordination: whether a person, or an impersonal market. But when you successfully do the revolution, you may kill the competent people and make the market illegal. Then, there may be many people who know how to grow grain and bake bread, but some activities necessary for this process may be made illegal and punished by death. The result is shortage of bread.
The king does not have to know how to make bread, but should not be so insane that he prevents anyone in his kingdom from making bread. And believing e.g. that “objective reality does not exist and everything is socially constructed” seems like a royal road to insanity; but at the same time it is easy to imagine how a person who only ever plays “social games” might find that credible.
It seems like the ideal leisure activities, then, should combine the social games with games against nature. Sports do this to some extent, but the “game against nature” part is mostly physical rather than intellectual.
Maybe we could improve on that. I’m envisioning some sort of combination of programming and lacrosse, where the field reconfigures itself according to the players’ instructions with a 10-second delay...
But more realistically, certain sports are more strategic and intellectual than others. I’ve seen both tennis and fencing mentioned as sports that involve quick strategic thinking and predicting your opponent, although they lack the team element that lets you build coordination skills. Maybe some kind of group fencing would be good… or doubles tennis?
Exactly! Hence arts (and sports).
War.
Strategic, intellectual, contains the team element, and is highly motivating :-P
I don’t think knowing how to grow grain and bake bread helps you avoiding to turn a free market economy into a planned economy that mismanages resources. Mao prohibited farm ownership and no amount of understanding the actual skill of baking or growing crops would have convinced him that private ownership is a good idea.
Lysenko’s success is also not simply about lack of farming knowledge but about having an intellectual climate that’s not well-fitted from separating true theories from those that aren’t.
What makes you so sure of this? More to the point, what makes you sure that a society that tied status more closely to such skills wouldn’t have promoted someone better than Mao to the top?
The point here is to get into the reasons why intellectual climates have the properties they do, with respect to the ability to develop and identify true theories.
To be sure, societies could have multiple failure modes, and I am open to the possibility that the USSR and Maoist China may have been bad for reasons entirely unconnected to the relationship between status and physical cognition. However, the populist character of both makes me doubt this, as populism seems anticorrelated with both good aesthetics and good science.
There have been enough revolutions and (temporarily successful) peasant revolts to demonstrate how that usually turns out. Lenin famously said that “Any cook should be able to run the country” and I don’t think it worked well.
As I said above,
Thus, by “a society that tied status more closely to such skills”, I do not mean the typical conditions leading to, and resulting from, a peasant revolt.
If only someone had thought to send Lenin to cookery school.
It’s more complicated :-D Like in French, most Russian nouns have masculine or feminine gender and IIRC in the original Russian the cook was specifically a female cook. And Lenin, sigh, was a cishet white male.
If https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Vladimir_Lenin is to be believed then it’s more complicated still because what Lenin actually said was exactly the opposite.
A meme necessarily looks better than the actual source :-/
Mao was the son of a farmer. Mao actually worked on his father farm instead of learning the piano and was bullied for his farmer background in high school.
I don’t think good aesthetics tell you about how to grow crops or bake bread.
Sure, but that’s true of most every human activity under the sun (including “games with nature”).
Knowing NOT to do this is in no way dependent on knowing how to grow wheat or bake bread.
I agree, but here the difference between beliefs and aliefs becomes important. Besides, physical reality has a habit of rudely intruding into social constructs and if you still insist on ignoring it, well, you might be in line for a Darwin Award.
LOL
I would describe this more generally as real-world achievement, which is a lot clearer than a label like “physical cognition”. Eric S. Raymond has a nice post which details how the beneficial effects of having a shared standard of achievement can play out socially, at least in the strictly technical realm.
Oh, and by the way, good scholarship can definitely count as legitimate “achievement” in many circumstances. This most likely explains how even the most stereotypical “humanities academia” can sometimes manage to be both intellectually engaging and socially healthy. Yes, there are lots of worrying dynamics in the “X Studies” part of academia, but sometimes good work still happens there.
There you go again, compulsively trying to round concepts off to something else!
“Real-world achievement” is considerably less clear as a way of pointing to what I am trying to point to than “physical cognition”. It evokes all kinds of distracting side-issues about what constitutes the “real world”. (Is pure mathematics “real-world achievement”? et cetera, et cetera).
I can’t tell what the point of your second paragraph is. Is it just an attempt to provide reassurance (to whom?) about the value of humanities academia, in the face of what you took to be a “boo humanities academia!” from me (in my comment on Otium)? Or are you seeking to dispute my contention that physical cognition is underpracticed and undervalued there (in which case it would tend to look like your proposal to substitute “real-world achievement” for “physical cognition” was an attempt to muddy the waters in preparation for an equivocation)?
All this notwithstanding, I’m grateful for the pointer to the Eric Raymond essay, as it is relevant to what I was talking about with respect to Maslow and so forth. (In particular, it serves as anecdotal information about, and confirmation of, the distinction between Levels 4 and 5.)
Creating a distinct new concept in one’s mind is an expensive operation (with both short term and long term costs), so I think it’s only to be expected that people will try to match a supposedly new concept to an existing one and see if they can get away with just reusing the existing concept. I suggest that if you don’t want people to do that, you should define your new concept as clearly as possible, give lots of both positive and negative examples, explain how it differs from any nearby concepts that people might try to “round off” to, and why it makes sense to organize one’s thinking in terms of the new concept. (It would also help to give it a googleable name so people can find all that information. Right now, Google defines physical cognition as “Physical cognition, or ‘folk physics’, is a common sense understanding of the physical world around us and how different objects interact with each other.” which is obviously not what you’re talking about.)
I think I’ve avoided rounding off your physical cognition to an existing concept, but I still don’t understand how the concept is defined exactly or why it’s a useful way of organizing one’s thinking as it relates to the question of what kinds of children’s activities are most valuable. Clearly there are distinct skills within what you call physical cognition, and all those skills are not equally valuable, nor does practicing one physical cognition skill improve all physical cognition skills equally (e.g., if you practice math skills you improve math skills more than piano skills, and vice versa). Given that, why does it make sense to group a bunch of different skills together into “physical cognition” and then say that practicing piano is valuable because it exercises physical cognition? Wouldn’t it make more sense to talk about exactly what skills are improved by practicing piano, and how valuable the increase of those specific skills are?
Right, but I was reacting to a prior history with that particular commenter, who has been especially prone to doing this (very often where, in my view, it isn’t appropriate).
But also: I regard concept-creation as being a large part of what we’re in the business of doing, here. (At least, it’s a large part of what I’m here for.) That’s what theorization is, and I think we’re here to theorize (maybe among other things). So it’s a cost that I think one has signed up to bear in a context of this sort.
For the most part, it’s great if one has the motivation to write up a thorough exposition of a new concept, starting from very elementary premises (although there’s also the negative aspect of potentially reinforcing a norm of this level of effort being generally expected every time one wants to introduce a new concept). However, one doesn’t always have that motivation (or time, etc.), so it should be allowed sometimes to just point and say “look over here; if you think about this for a while, you may traverse the same inferential path I have, which leads to this conclusion.”
Indeed, that’s basically exactly what I want out of this forum: a place where people can state inferentially-distant conclusions you might not hear elsewhere (without necessarily needing to justify them from first principles—such requirements might, after all, be part of why they’re not heard elsewhere!). This, of course, requires a community where a certain amount of epistemic trust has been built up, but I think that happened already (c. 2009-11).
For epistemic norms designed to avoid false positives, there are skeptics’ forums, and scientific journals. And your grandmother (to paraphrase Feynman). Here, we could use more of the opposite approach (avoiding false negatives). Who else specializes in that (high-quality speculation)? It’s basically an empty niche.
Perhaps I can “strike a chord” with you in particular by talking about value uncertainty in this context. Even to the extent it’s clear that not all of the “subskills” are equally valuable (which I don’t necessarily concede, in part because its not even clear to me what the right decomposition into subskills is!), it’s not necessarily clear which ones are more valuable, and by how much.
To be honest, I’m a little bit suspicious of the whole approach of trying to decompose something like music (or the “physical cognition” involved therein) into its component subskills, with the aim of measuring their relative values. The reason for this is that I doubt anyone currently understands either music, psychology, or ‘values’ well enough to do this—at least, at any level of detail much beyond what I’ve already done by pointing to the physicality of music. To me, the relation between physicality of this sort and certain especially valuable forms of thought (precise, imaginative) is intuitively obvious, and I think consideration and investigation into the matter will reveal this to others; but I don’t think this translates easily into something like “music study trains Cognitive Skill S X% more effectively than [rival activity]”, especially where we can be confident that S is ontologically sound, and X numerically accurate, “enough”.
What is on more solid ground at the moment is the heuristic, correlational case that it is better to be the kind of person who is interested and experienced in things like music than the kind of person who isn’t. And it’s better to live in the kind of society where such pursuits are enjoyed and admired than in the kind where they’re not.
It would be nice to have a more detailed idea of why this is the case—but I think the study of music, and the other activities in this reference class, is itself a conceptual prerequisite for more fully understanding the phenomenon.
I don’t think that’s a reasonable expectation or norm. The expected return from a reader doing something like that is way too low, even in a community like this one. Most new ideas are wrong, and if your idea is wrong then people trying to traverse the same inferential path will get nowhere, and not even know if its their own fault or not. If you write it down then people can figure out where you went wrong and point it out. Even if your idea is right and your reader can be sure of that, why shouldn’t you write an good explanation once, which will then save time for potentially hundreds or thousands of readers? By trying to save that time for yourself, you cause other people to waste their time, and then you end up having to answer their confusions and perhaps not even save time for yourself.
You could make an exception to this if you just had a new idea and you want to find out if anyone else already had a similar idea or can see an obvious flaw in it, before deciding to invest more time into explaining it fully, but that doesn’t seem to be what you’re doing here.
I have some uncertainty here, but not that much. I took one semester of piano and one semester of electronic music in high school, and it was intuitively clear that the return from that time spent wasn’t nearly as valuable as say reading science fiction or economics textbooks. There’s obviously a lot of individual differences here, so if my kid naturally has an interest or talent in music or art and wants to study it, I’m not going to stop her. But if your position is that we should more vigorously encourage an interest in artistic pursuits, I’m going to need more evidence and/or better arguments.
This is totally unclear to me. I guess even if it’s true, it would be hard for me to figure out on my own since I probably haven’t studied music enough to be familiar with the kind of “physicality” that you’re talking about. Nor do I understand what forms of thought you’re suggesting is related to such physicality. “Precise, imaginative” is pretty vague.
I agree with the latter, but I think it’s just because in every society there will be some people who naturally enjoy artistic pursuits and almost everyone at least enjoy consuming art, so if art isn’t being enjoyed and admired, something must have gone terribly wrong to have caused that. On an individual level, such a correlation, if it exists, can be easily explained by the fact that “better” people have more resources available to pursue artistic interests. Again if you’re making the case that artistic pursuits cause people to become better (compared to other pursuits they could spend the time on), you’ll have to give more evidence and/or better arguments.
I disagree with these statements. (Even in the case of “most new ideas are wrong”, I would ADBOC.)
You’re basically just stating the view that “false positives are a bigger problem than false negatives”, which I already disagreed with explicitly (as applied to this context) in my previous comment.
Because what constitutes a “good explanation” is strongly reader-dependent, and I don’t have good enough models of most readers to know in advance what will satisfy them. It’s worth it to try being very foundational sometimes, but not all the time. It’s also worth it for readers to sometimes practice the skill of traversing inferential paths more nimbly.
I wouldn’t presume to take such a detailed position on how you should relate to your child. (Though I can think of someone you might want to talk to, about not only this but the whole subject of “what to do” with children who are, or who are at “risk” of being, “gifted”—the best way to get into contact with that person would probably be through Jonah Sinick.)
My concern here is only to explain (insofar as is possible within the number of words I’m willing to expend) something about what the value of traditional artistic pursuits is, and, in particular, the ways in which it’s similar to the value of less traditional artistic pursuits like programming. I think you (like many, no doubt, in the LW audience) have bad priors about this due to insufficient exposure in early life (perhaps for socioeconomic reasons—as you said above, “My parents didn’t have the time or money to deliberately cultivate these kinds of interests in me when I was a child). I myself also had relatively little deliberate exposure (for the same reasons), but, exceptionally, was drawn in the relevant direction by an unusually strong intrinsic attraction (such that, had I come from an upper-class background, I would very likely have been involved at a much higher level much earlier). As a result, I think I am in the position of perceiving something about this that most LW readers are probably missing (insofar as they seem to want to reduce interest in these pursuits, implicitly and even explicitly, as we’ve seen here, to some kind of mere class signal—indeed, a form of conspicuous consumption).
There is a kind of pleasure, when one performs a complex movement “just so”, that attracts some people to e.g. martial arts without the goal of learning to defend themselves. (It was so with me, but, well, socioeconomic reasons.) There’s a kind of a message that some people get out of poetry, besides the ‘prosaic sense’ of it, which sometimes gets related in another piece of poetry or even a very different way. I used to wonder, what exactly is its impact on different people’s understanding of the whole, & might not ‘understanding’ be an umbrella word for some orthogonal things… Some of which get called ‘spiritual’ for lack of a better term:)
For me, I don’t see how “physical cognition” is better, because just what “physical” means here is as unclear to me as what “real-world” means in bogus’s comment, and in rather similar ways. Is doing pure mathematics “physical cognition”? What about physics?
With no more context than your earlier comment where (so far as I know) you first used the term, I’d have taken “physical cognition” to mean something like “applying one’s brain directly to the real world in ways involving planning and subtlety and the like”, with playing a musical instrument being an example. But I now have the impression that you intend it more broadly than that, perhaps including e.g. musical composition (even if done in one’s head). But exactly what you mean remains unclear to me, as does why (if I’m understanding you right) you consider “physical cognition” a more fruitful category of things to lump together than “real-world achievement”.
(Note for the avoidance of doubt: I am not claiming that “physical cognition” is not a more fruitful category, nor that bogus’s thinking in this area is better than yours, nor anything of that kind. I am just saying that it seems unreasonable to complain of someone “rounding off concepts” when you have made no apparent effort to clarify what you do mean, and that your specific objection to “real-world achievement” seems to apply equally to “physical cognition”.)
In my original comment, I linked to the essay that was the source of the concepts of “physical” and “social cognition” as I used them in that comment. Without the context of that essay, there is no reason to expect my remarks in this discussion to be intelligible.
OK. Then I have a confession and three complaints. The confession is that when I wrote what I did above, I hadn’t noticed that you offered that link as further explanation of the term “physical cognition”. The complaints are (1) that having now followed the link, I think it leaves the meaning of “physical cognition” still less than perfectly clear; and, in so far as it does explain what the term means, (2a) it actually seems not so far from “real-world achievement” and (2b) I think it probably doesn’t include music and art. (Whereas in your usage it seems like it must.)
I’ll elaborate a bit. Here is what that essay says about physical and social cognition. (The only actual instance of those terms is at the end of the second quoted paragraph, but I think the preceding stuff is necessary to make sense of that.)
So. We start with Maslow’s hierarchy. Vassar (the author of the essay) puts a division between the two “lowest” levels, which he calls “physical” (meaning that they are concerned with our physical needs and wants) and the next two, which he calls “social” (meaning that they are concerned with our interactions with others). The topmost level (“self-actualization”) I think Vassar classifies as “social”, which I think mostly indicates that his terminology isn’t great.
And he says that attempts to address needs and wants higher up in the Maslow hierarchy tend to involve vague fuzzy socailly-mediated things, which may “be fairly easily hacked” and “constitute a poor foundation for universal cognition” by comparison with activity directed at the lower levels, which tend to involve precise specific details and “constitute a good substrate for digital, and thus potentially abstract, cognition”. And, finally, he says that the lower-level ones seem to be endorsed over the higher-level by the likes of Newton and Feynman.
All fair enough (though I’m not at all convinced). But now you want to say that artistic endeavour belongs in the category of “physical cognition”? Really? Perhaps the purely mechanical aspects of playing an instrument do, but what distinguishes music from finger exercises is vague fuzzy socially-mediated things like “beauty” and “taste” which seem to me much more like “weirdness, gravitas and sexiness” than like “solidity and shape”, and which I think land squarely in the category of “social cognition” according to Vassar’s distinction.
My point (2a) is less important than (2b) which is why I’ve focused on the latter, but now a word or two about (2a). If I am understanding Vassar right, what distinguishes “physical cognition” is that its goals are located in the physical world and can be evaluated without reference to social context (moral norms, fashions, the approval of the elite, …). And if I am understanding bogus right, this is pretty close to what he means by “real-world”. Not quite the same, but closer (as it seems to me) than anything that would put artistic endeavours in the “physical” category.
Like others, you seem to be interpreting my comments as if they were stating conclusions intended to be only one or two inferential steps away (from your current epistemic state). This is not at all necessarily the case!
In particular, when I state a proposition X, I expect readers not only to ask themselves whether they already think X is true (i.e. conditioned on all their knowledge before my statement), but also to ask themselves why I might believe X. To engage, in other words, in at least a cursory search for inferential chains leading to X—resulting in either the discovery of an inferential chain that they themselves agree with (in which case communication has been approximately successful), or a hypothesis about what my error is (which can then be discussed, and confirmed or disconfirmed).
This mental motion seems to be missing from your (and, even more severely, others’) reactions to my comments. It’s as if I were expected to be modeling your epistemic state, without any corresponding expectation that you be modeling mine. Yet, insofar as I’ve stated a specific belief, you have some specific information about mine, whereas I have only background information about yours. This will of course change once you reply—I will get more specific information about yours—but the dialogue will be more efficient if your reply attempts to integrate and respond to the information you have about my epistemic state, rather than merely providing information about yours (as is the case when your reply takes the form “you have made one or more assumptions that I don’t share”, as here, for example).
Now, to get back to the object level:
You have overlooked a distinction that, while not explicitly stated in the essay itself, is nevertheless crucial to understanding the point Vassar is making: the distinction between people’s needs, themselves, and the programs that they use to satisfy them. The pathology that Vassar is complaining about is the fact that as one ascends the hierarchy of needs, the programs that people tend to use for satisfying them become less physical and more social in nature: society in effect reserves its highest rewards for those most practiced in social, rather than physical, cognition. The essay implies that he regards this as being, in at least some sense, contingent: in principle, society could be set up so that physical cognition played a greater role in the satisfaction of higher Maslow-needs (belonging, esteem, self-actualization).
This is the background for my assertions about art—which I made first not here, but on Sarah Constantin’s blog Otium, in a comment thread that, again, I linked in my original comment here (and is thus assumed to be fully loaded into the context of this discussion):
So: from this it should be evident that not only do I think that certain arts are heavily physical-cognition-loaded, but, furthermore, the very failure to understand this is, in my view, itself a manifestation of the pathology that Vassar’s essay was (in large part) about.
(Just as an aside: in case there is any doubt about my interpretation of Vassar, here is an e-mail I wrote to him in March 2013:
To which he replied, in full:
)
Thus, I think it was somewhat logically rude of you to ask, in a tone of incredulity,
and to follow that by an un-self-conscious affirmation of the conventional assumption that I had, very knowingly, denied.
“Really?” Yes, really. Not only am I aware that conventional wisdom assumes the contrary, but I specifically cited the conventionality of that assumption as an example of the Maslow-pathology described by Vassar. Yes, I know people think that
-- this (I claim) is a problem!
Now, it’s understandable that you might be curious about why I believe what I believe in this realm. And, to a large extent, I’m perfectly happy to discuss it. (After all, on my beliefs, it’s in my interest to do so!) But the inferential chains may be long, and my communication style is a high-context one. Even if I have made a mistake in my reasoning, it is not likely to be identified efficiently by means of a discussion that takes it as plausible that I might have arrived at my conclusions randomly.
It seems hard to envision a society wherein belonging and esteem could be satisfied via physical cognition, at least until we can make building an AIBO pet dog robot in one’s garage a common enough pasttime. So, the only realistic possibility for a meaningful change is in how self-actualization is pursued. But is it actually true that “social” paths to self-actualization are less collectively desirable than “physical” paths to the same?
Well, for a start, there are certainly “fine things in life” that are best understood in social terms; for a handy example that fits squarely in the realm of art, consider so-called “literary” fiction. Now I obviously cannot claim that writing literary fiction could ever be considered an “achievement” of the purest sort (in my preferred sense), since its value is not something that can be generally assessed in any widely-agreed upon way. And yet, it is certainly the case that, to the extent that works of literary fiction are widely considered to be valuable accomplishments, this is due to what they imply about the social universe, as opposed to the physical one!
The belief that I am implicitly denying here seems to be, as quoted directly from the parent comment: “To effectively create value requires skill in analytical/”near-mode” thinking” (emphasis added). And that’s certainly true in many cases (it’s also true, as you rightly point out, that many of the “finer things in life” are far from entirely social!) but not in general. This matters here, because it seems to lead you to incorrect conclusions about what exactly makes “self-actualization” value-creating and collectively desirable. It’s not the absence of “social cognition” in its entirety but rather, of a few undesirable aspects of social interaction that are rather more pervasive at the level of “esteem” and “belonging”. Vassar’s essay is even quite clear that these aspects exist, and are important to his point!
Not hard to envision at all; only hard, perhaps, to implement. It shouldn’t take all that much imagination to summon the thought of a society in which people were better rewarded with status (and all its trappings) for things like solving mathematical problems, or composing complexly-structured music, as opposed to all the various generalized forms of pure politics that determine the lion’s share of status in the world we know, than they actually are in the world we know.
In fact, we can look around and find historical examples of societies where that was the case. In my Otium comment I pointed to one: Imperial Germany (pre-WWI). That was a place where a figure like Max Reger could achieve high status in general culture—without even needing to be a Nietzschean superman to do so. All he had to do was follow the rules of society, which happened to permit someone with those kinds of compositional aspirations to become a celebrity.
My radical belief is that the fact that this is the same culture that also produced leading figures in every other field of creative intellection (and a place where shops in university towns sold pictures of professors in postcard form), and indeed is credited by Tyler Cowen with “deliver[ing] the goods in terms of innovation”, is not a coincidence.
This is an extreme example—in fact the best I know of, at least at the level of entire nations—but the phenomenon is a matter of degree.
Yes. Narrative fiction is the least physically-oriented of the arts. Its existence is most of the reason for the qualifier “at least certain forms [of art]” in my comment on Sarah’s blog.
Note that it is also the only art-form that is widely appreciated at anything like a sophisticated level by the “rationalist community” as a whole. This is a problem. (Basically, it reflects an implicit belief that only STEM is about physical cognition; since all art is assumed to be almost wholly social, LWers opt for the “least pretentious” variant, i.e. the most socioculturally “accessible” form to them, namely fiction, specifically fanfiction.)
I never said it was. What made you think otherwise?
Above, I specifically said that arts synthesized physical and social cognition, and implied that that was important to their value.
The problem I’m talking about is the absence of physical cognition, not the presence of social cognition.
It would be helpful if you try to define what you mean with “art” or “physical cognition” if you see people thinking you mean something different than you do.
Nope. More formally, I’m saying that the relation between the “physical” nature of cognition and the social benefits you talk about is essentially screened off by the more immediate fact that such physical activities are far more likely to feature a widely-agreed standard of achievement. Thus, the fact that humanities scholarship is in some sense “non-physical” (which it obviously is, since it is properly about human cultures, as opposed to physical phenomena such as the mechanics of playing an instrument) is practically irrelevant to whether or not we should consider it to be “intellectually stimulating”, at least inasmuch as the merit of such scholarship is sometimes widely agreed upon.
To some extent, these issues seem to be unavoidable. One reason why pure math academia is in such a “bad” shape socially is that it is only directly valued by a tiny minority. Within the subculture that values it, though, achievement is reasonably clear and thus it can at least escape the negative connotations of “social cognition”. A similar situation seems to apply in newly-composed “serious” music, even though the subculture that values that might be even smaller, and the standard of “what makes this new piece worthwhile enough that I should be paying attention to it” somewhat less than clear.
Upper class folks don’t spend all their time in consumption and gossip, with art as their only lifeline to the real world. They do business and politics as well.
I’m having trouble understanding this. Why do artistic pursuits constitute practice in physical cognition as opposed to social cognition? It seems obvious to me that artistic pursuits are (among other things) a type of status signaling, so I’m confused why you’re contrasting the two. Please explain?
(Aside from not being sure how valid the Maslow hierarchy is) I agree with this. But I don’t see art/music/dance classes as a particularly good way to prepare most kids to fulfill their level 4 and 5 needs, mostly because there is too much competition from other parents pushing their kids into artistic pursuits. The amount of talent, time, and effort needed to achieve recognition or a feeling of accomplishment seem too high, compared to other possible pursuits.
Basically, Maslow’s hierarchy of needs is a myth, and everyone would be better off forgetting about it entirely.
Not necessarily; it depends on what one’s default or alternative theory would be. Let’s be Bayesian, after all.
As I interpret it, “Maslow’s hierarchy of needs” is little more than the claim that people’s goals depend on their internal sense of security and status (in addition to whatever else they might depend on).
When I speak about it, I’m usually talking about something like a spectrum of exogenous vs. endogenous motivation: at one end you have someone being chased by a wild animal (thus maximally influenced by the environment), and at the other, the Nietzschean “superhuman” who lives only according to their own values, rather than channeling or being a tool of anyone or anything else (thus minimally influenced by the environment in some sense, although obviously everything is ultimately a product of some external force).
Self-determination theory is the standard alternative theory I usually point to (which also incorporates the spectrum of exogenous vs. endogenous motivation, but which I don’t think the hierarchy of needs as usually conceived does).
Thanks for the link; that’ll be useful to refer to.
Of course, I on the contrary do think the hierarchy of needs is suggestive of this, as evidenced by the fact that I specifically interpreted it that way!
It’s certainly not a myth because it’s a theory (or a hypothesis) which actually exists. Its weak forms are rather obvious, famished poets notwithstanding. Psychology is not physics and should not pretend to be physics, it deals in weak generalizations and fuzzy conclusions. Maslow’s hierarchy should not be thought of as an iron law which applies everywhere to everyone—it’s merely a framework for thinking about needs.
Sure, but we’re talking about a theory that isn’t even accepted as a psychological theory: psychologists themselves have examined it, decided there was no reason to believe in it, and moved on.
Has it been falsified? That is, empirically shown to be not true with regard to large populations (as opposed to individual counter-examples)?
That’s what the quote I posted said; the individual counter-examples are one thing, but the main thing is the complete lack of evidence for it.
Fair point, the quote did say that. Interesting.
Artistic pursuits involve a synthesis of physical and social cognition. (This is essential to their nature and is what makes them special among human activities.) There is certainly a social aspect, but it’s crucial that that isn’t all there is. That there is also a physical aspect is also pretty obvious, if you consider what is involved in playing an instrument, for example—but importantly, it goes beyond that, to encompass the ways one thinks about something like music (in terms of motion, as well as ideas like connectedness, and so on).
Generally speaking, whenever we think of something as being “technical”, we’re talking about the involvement of physical cognition. Art is social, yes, but it is also highly technical.
Many people, unfortunately, underappreciate the physical, or technical, side of artistic thought. This is what I was warning against in my comments on Otium.
This is actually not really true, but it’s understandable that you might perceive it that way. Even so, the time and effort are part of the point: anything fulfilling this role has to involve extensive amounts of interaction with the objects or processes in question.
For certain arts—e.g. music—this is true (in the sense in which I understand “physical cognition”—the body is intimately involved). But a counter-example would be something like digital art where your tools are on Photoshop palettes. The physical skill involved is moving a mouse and I don’t think this qualifies. And yet, digital art is highly “technical”.
That is not what I meant—as the excerpt you quoted was intended to communicate.
Musical composition is one of the archetypal instances of a physical-cognition-loaded activity (in the sense that I mean), and yet there your physical tools are a pencil/pen and paper (or, sometimes, indeed, a mouse).
So what do you mean, then? I don’t understand what “physical cognition” in this context points to. What is the word “physical” doing in there?
It failed.
See here. (This was linked in the original comment...)
Sorry, still don’t understand it. gjm has a fairly detailed list of complaints and I concur with them.
Do you think you use the term physical cognition in the way it’s used in the literature? Or do you think you use it in a different way?
“The literature” that is relevant here consists of Michael Vassar’s 2013 Edge essay.
It’s relevant in the way that it doesn’t use the term “physical cognition”?
From the fourth paragraph:
For some reason, it’s not overly surprising to me that both Isaac Newton and Richard Feynman would directly endorse physical cognition—what with them being natural philosophers/physicists. It’s less clear however that such “physical cognition” is directly relevant to e.g. music composition, except inasmuch as both physics and music composition are linked to self-actualization—as opposed to ‘mere’ love, belonging and self-esteem, which (if pursued in excess, due to a lack of “self-actualizing” pursuits) might “lead[] to increased unethical behavior” or “produce anti-social narcissism” according to the essay you link to.
You can use ballet dancing or piano playing for status signaling but first you need to learn to dance ballet or play the piano.
Wow that seems overly dismissive of the arts. My daughter loves ballet ever since she saw a friends ballet birthday party. She is a very physical / body oriented learning type who fidgets at school. Ballet is a great outlet, builds coordination and gives her self confidence. I know I can say similar things of piano lessons. I quite shocked that you can reduce that to “upper-class costly signaling.”
Sure, costly signaling has to be a big part of any analysis, but isn’t sports also a costly and unproductive way of signaling one’s physical and genetic fitness? Sports can also be a fun way of exercising, but some kids find ballet fun and it can also be good exercise. People have claimed various (non-signaling) benefits of learning to play an instrument as well, and that can also be an enjoyable activity for some.
Apparently some parents make their kids take lessons to increase the chances of getting into private school, and eventually an elite college, so another big part of the analysis might be the costs/benefits of private vs public school and elite vs non-elite colleges. (I personally went to public school and a state university.) Another big part is, if you leave a kid a lot of free time, how likely is it they’ll eventually find something valuable to do with it? Or alternatively, what are some more valuable activities we should try to guide a child into instead of the standard ones?
Disclaimer: US-centric perspective
Elite colleges generally students who are “genuinely” (insert adjectives here), not yet another honor roll student with a boring essay about how their voluntourism trip to Africa changed their life. In a competitive field like that, you want to stand out, and you stand out a lot more by doing something that both clearly signals being good at things and is different from the signals that other students are sending.
Therefore, doing whatever other students of your socio-economic status do is a bad strategy. Much better to do something impressive and different.
It’s not like your kid can opt out of signalling. There’s lots of aspects of the value of these activities, and demonstration of talent, conscientiousness, and the right kind of conforming excellence can be a large part of what you and the kid gets out of it.
Bonus if they also get some excercise, practice and encouragement of good habits along the way.
Sure, but are the standard activities actually optimal even for this purpose? For example I learned to program as a kid, then in college wrote one of the first open source cryptography libraries, after which I had my pick of job offers. I probably put less total hours into this than someone who practiced piano for an hour a day from age 5, and got more out of it. But I’m not sure if that was luck, or if I can expect my own kid to duplicate this.
Also, now that learning to program has become a standard activity that parents push kids into (just look at how many tablet games there are that purport to teach kids how to program), it probably doesn’t have as much signaling or practical value due to competition, and I’m wondering what is the modern equivalent of learning to program as a kid in the 80s.
Superforcasting might be an area that will be very useful in the future.
Cryptocurrency investment. Imagine how your kid’s peers will be impressed to hear “when I was at elementary school, I put my pocket money in various altcoins, and… long story short, I am a billionaire now”. :D
But maybe learning to program is the modern equivalent of learning to program. Just because there are many tablet games teaching kids how to build “a loop in a loop” programs from predefined blocks, doesn’t mean that kids will bother to play the games, and will move to further stages of programming.
Markets are anti-inductive; why do you think there’s future money lying on the street in buying some of many altcoins?