https://www.maximum-progress.com/p/something-is-getting-harder-but-its
Can frame this as a reply to SBF on shakespeare, also SSC model of progress slowing to an asymptote (in non rigid/decomposible fields) from ars longa vita brevis.
- oh duh this is super relevant to the Chinese football point.
Phenomenon of miracle years can be explained as the same thing as “you have your whole life to write your first album, and a year to write your second”. Plus curse of success maybe?
Re the point on Shakespeare, how does SBFs presumed base rates based on population link with China being shit at soccer, (the means of normal distribution, not their size, is what matters for outliers) vs. extreme talent is multiplicative, so it will be super rare. Or maybe one of the multiplicative factors in talent is a good network so the size of a society doesn’t matter as much as it’s structure or something. In general is talent/achievement normally distributed or is it long tailed?
- are multiplicative and harmonic processes/abilities the same thing?
Innovators are institutions not individuals.
Lakatos on improving and degenerating research programs. This links the progress of art with the progress of philosophy and science Moral progress and philosophy
What kind of process generates artistic and scientific innovators.
astronomy vs. chemistry vs. compsci vs. philosophy lines?
Frontier of art - age of artists vs. scientists at age of most impressive achievement? Control for life expectancy? Art becoming less technique-based should make people younger?
(In) Efficient markets seems similar to finding there’s no W-8BEN pdf extractor seems similar to question of how long does it take to get to the research frontier.
Something about saturated culture → breaking up of artistic innovations?
Bayesian reasoning about graphs
Graph of saints for model of retrospective sanctification (education aspect)
Scott’s ars longa, vita brevis for a simple model of frontiers, lifespans, cumulative vs random progress. It’s fantastic.
- Is this based on Stephenson’s Anathem?
Also check notes on philosophical progress I guess?
Also Randall Collins on networks of creativity for composers.
If the returns on study are compounding, shouldn’t we expect to see the age that people started learning something relevant to their chosen field be a major predictor of success in that field.
What if the returns are compounding but there’s also diminishing marginal direct returns? Would this support positive treatment effect of polymaths/interdisciplinary work. How might tails come together or apart for philosophy/other discipline pairs?
Important to note that the appearance of the tails not coming apart is mostly an artefact of supposed polymaths being one-man gell-man amnesia producing machines, e.g. Da Vinci
See interview about american growth: https://www.aei.org/pethokoukis/peak-america-is-our-most-innovative-century-behind-us-a-qa-with-robert-gordon/
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2302269120 on the reputation of artists peaking just before their deaths, then declining
See also toby ord’s paper on the lindy effect and what distributions tend to generate it.
Why do performers in some fields peter out and others don’t, e.g. And precisely because of the less abstract, more personality-laden nature of popular music, it is harder to have a very long career and attain the status of a true titan. The Rolling Stones ran out of steam forty (?) years ago, but Bach could have kept on writing fugues, had he lived longer. (Cowen)
in physics, chemistry, and mathematics, sleeping beauties seem to occur at higher rates than in other scientific fields.
If much of the greatness we perceive in past thinkers is their having created us, it makes sense that the creators a society regards as the greatest will always precede them by a lot. The same goes for past creators ostensibly defining the criteria of goodness. If these two affects persist, and somehow crowd out potential replacers, we should expect to see fewer and fewer additions to an increasingly saturated canon with each passing year.
Test this by looking at figures who left the canon, like Tasso.
More generally, look at the distribution and figure out what you can tell about the selection mechanism based on that.
If you want more data, look at the canon circa 1900, 1800, etc. And across different cultures to see if the same thing persists
Hazlitt (Just re read why the arts are not progressive)
- If you show (my friend) any work for his approbation, he asks, “Whose is the superscription?” — He judges of genius by its shadow, reputation — of the metal by the coin. He is just the reverse of another person whom I know — for as Godwin never allows a particle of merit to anyone till it is acknowledged by the whole world, Coleridge withholds his tribute of applause from every person in whom any mortal but himself can descry the least glimpse of understanding. He would be thought to look farther into a millstone than anybody else.
- Those arts, which depend on individual genius and incommunicable power, have always leaped at once from infancy to manhood, from the first rude dawn of invention to their meridian height and dazzling lustre, and have in general declined ever after. This is the peculiar distinction and privilege of each, of science and of art:—of the one, never to attain its utmost limit of perfection; and of the other, to arrive at it almost at once. Homer, Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, Dante, and Ariosto, (Milton alone was of a later age, and not the worse for it)—Raphael, Titian, Michael Angelo, Correggio, Cervantes, and Boccaccio, the Greek sculptors and tragedians,—all lived near the beginning of their arts—perfected, and all but created them.
- In general, it must happen in the first stages of the Arts, that as none but those who had a natural genius for them would attempt to practise them, so none but those who had a natural taste for them would pretend to judge of or criticise them. This must be an incalculable advantage to the man of true genius, for it is no other than the privilege of being tried by his peers. In an age when connoisseurship had not become a fashion; when religion, war, and intrigue, occupied the time and thoughts of the great, only those minds of superior refinement would be led to notice the works of art, who had a real sense of their excellence; and in giving way to the powerful bent of his own genius, the painter was most likely to consult the taste of his judges. He had not to deal with pretenders to taste, through vanity, affectation, and idleness.
- Are there more aesthetic fashions that scientific ones? Maybe? Kinda? If Hanson is right that progress should be a random walk is this a mark against the existence of artistic progress?
As the artist has a lifetime to write their first album and a year to write their second, maybe traditions have years to produce their first master before they’re recognised as traditions. This seems especially apt with homer and stuff where they’re the first writer. Yes, great men carve paths in the very high dimensional space of possible arts that later people follow.
- there’s also the obvious point that to be discovered/reproduced you need to be great, and you’ll then regress to the mean, so the first album of probably going to be the best.
Gwern on proof of possibility by actuality - All non anglos thought the bomb was infeasible, so they didn’t seriously attempt it like the Americans did. Once one country in your reference class has done it (e.g. China 64 for the developing world) it becomes easy. Same with hydrogen bombs.
- This explains why the best figures in traditions often come earlier.