Tag Archives: Art

Ideals Can Conflict

By Robin Hanson · January 28, 2012 4:10 pm · Comments (11)

The usual wisdom says we are most creative when working in groups that avoid criticism. This is wrong:

His book … was published in 1948. … Osborn’s most celebrated idea was … the essential rules of a successful brainstorming session. The single most important … was the absence of criticism and negative feedback. … Brainstorming was an immediate hit and Osborn became a popular business guru. …

But … brainstorming … doesn’t work. The first empirical test of Osborn’s brainstorming technique was performed at Yale University, in 1958. … Groups were instructed to follow Osborn’s guidelines. As a control sample, the scientist gave the same puzzles to forty-eight students working by themselves. … The solo students came tip with roughly twice as many solutions as the brainstorming groups, and a panel of judges deemed their solutions more “feasible” and “effective.” … Numerous follow up studies have come to the same conclusion. …

Nemeth … divided two hundred and sixty-five female undergraduates into teams of five. … The first set of teams got the standard brainstorming spiel, including the no-criticism rules. Other teams were told … “Most studies suggest that you should debate and criticize each other’s ideas.” The rest received no further instructions. …The brainstorming groups slightly outperformed the groups given no instructions, but teams given the debate condition were the most creative by far. On average, they generated twenty per cent more ideas. And after the teams disbanded, … brainstormers and the people given no guidelines produced an average of three additional ideas; the debaters produced seven. …

“There’s this Pollyannaish notion that the most important thing to do when working together is stay positive and get along, to not hurt anyone’s feelings. … Well, that’s just wrong.” (more)

Since the usual wisdom has resisted robust data for so long, it must be that people want to believe it. But why?

First note that we tend to believe this more about other people, and less about ourselves. It is a good idea for a good cause non-profit, or perhaps for our firm somewhere at some future date. But when we have a big immediate problem we really want to solve, we rarely invoke this process. So we believe this more in far mode.

Second, we tend to believe that idealistic things go together. For example, if art is good and peace is good, then art must promote peace, peace must promote art, and so on. Third, since far mode is more idealistic and less analytically critical, in far mode we are more willing to set aside analytic doubts to believe the simple correlation that all good things go together. Fourth, since we are especially creative, social, and uncritical in far mode, and we see all of these as idealistic good things, we are especially willing to believe that they all go together.

We are more idealistic in far mode, and all else equal far mode tends to promote idealistic things. So in far mode we tend to think all idealistic things promote each other. Peace, art, relaxation, positive moods, agreement, cooperation, altruism, creativity, love, etc. But in fact, there are usually tradeoffs – some ideals come at the cost of others.

Interestingly, the article I quote above goes on to talk about patterns of interaction that promote productivity, and it repeatedly just assumes that whatever promotes productivity promotes creativity. For example:

People who worked on Broadway were part of a social network. … The density of these connections [was] a figure he called Q. … A musical created by a team of strangers would have a low Q. … The relationships among collaborators emerged as a reliable predictor of Broadway success. When the Q was low … the musicals were likely to fail. Because the artists didn’t know one another, they struggled to work together and exchange ideas. … But, when the Q was too high, the work also suffered. The artists all thought in similar ways, which crushed innovation.

Note that this just assumes that a musical’s success is mainly a tradeoff between communication and innovation. Since a successful musical is good, and innovation and communication are good, then musicals must be good because of their innovation and communication. But lots of things that influence success could correlate with how many people you know on Broadway.

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Why Work Hour Limits?

By Robin Hanson · December 26, 2011 9:30 am · Comments (85)

Many laws discourage and limit work hours. Laws require holidays and vacations, limit hours per day and week, and require extra payment for work over these limits. And of course income taxes discourage work more generally. The standard economic explanation for these limits is to prevent inefficient signaling. People motivated to gain relative status, to show their extra dedication to success, and to appear more able, work extra hours, for a net social loss. Work hour limits can reduce such losses. (Academic articles here, here, here, here, here.)

This argument makes some sense, but it would make a lot more sense if we set broader and more consistent limits. Yet we don’t at all limit housework, and place few limits on self-employed work. Furthermore, high status occupations are especially exempt. Doctors, lawyers, managers, financiers, artists, writers, athletes, academics, and software engineers often work crazy hours. Yet the signaling argument would seem to apply nearly as well if not better to such high status work. Why are we so selective in our limits?

One explanation is a battle for relative status between professions and activities. Areas where work hours are limited produce less, and so look less impressive. Ambitious folks who want to show their high abilities then choose other areas, leading to an equilibrium were observers reasonably less respect folks who work in limited areas. On this story, work hour limits were set in manufacturing and manual labor in order to reduce the status of such activities.

A second related explanation is that each society is eager to look good to other societies. So each society prefers to encourage, not discourage, activities that are especially visible to outsiders. When outsiders evaluate societies more on the basis of their athletes than their shop technicians, societies naturally subsidize the former relative to the latter.

Another third explanation is that voters support limits on work hours in some jobs mainly as a way to defy and “stick it to” employers, who are seen as evil and in need of taking down. Firms who employ low status workers may themselves seem lower status and “exploitive,” and thus more acceptable targets of ire. Work hour limits serve as a quantity limit which raises wages and thus employer expenses. Any reduction of signaling losses is nice, but mainly a side effect.

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Buying Affiliation

By Robin Hanson · November 17, 2011 11:00 am · Comments (9)

We care about the origins of art. Comparing two physically identical artworks, we pay more for an original than a duplicate, and not because we think originals have better quality, rarity, resources, or effort. Instead it seems we pay for a more direct physical connection to the artist:

Duplicate artworks are judged to be less valuable than duplicate artifacts. We observed this effect even when both the original artwork and the original artifact were one of a kind and were equivalent in value. Experiment 2 helped to further rule out the potentially confounding inferences based on the relative quality of a duplicate artwork versus a duplicate artifact, as well as on the belief that duplicate artifacts are simply more common than duplicate artworks. Finally, the results of Experiment 3 address the alternative explanation that original artworks are valued because they are perceived as requiring more effort and resources to produce. …

The [importance of] degree of physical contact with the original artist (contagion). … was supported in Experiment 1 and more directly in Experiment 5, where artworks made with a hands-on process were judged to be more valuable than those made with a hands-off process. In addition, contagion had a larger impact for artworks than for artifacts. Support for uniqueness of performance as an important dimension came primarily from Experiment 4, where the act of intentionally duplicating a painting (as opposed to accidentally making a similar looking painting) had a twofold impact on judgments of value in driving down the value of a duplicate, while driving up the value of the original. …

[The idea] that people value original artworks solely because they observe that other people value originals more than duplicates—cannot be entirely correct. … Previous research has documented how … mere proximity between two items in a shopping cart or on a table may be sufficient to trigger inferences about contamination, which can raise or lower value. … Similarly, everyday artifacts can gain value through contact with certain special individuals, such as celebrities. Finally, assessments of a performance as effortful or unique may apply to wide array of objects and events, such as evaluations of sports or scholastic achievement. (more)

This lends some support to the suggestion that customers of academia, such as students, funders, and readers, pay in part for a more direct affiliation with certified-as-impressive academics.

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Hail Temple, Buck

By Robin Hanson · September 12, 2011 9:15 pm · Comments (14)

Two recent movies, Temple Grandin and Buck, depict the most inspirational real heroes I can recall. Temple Grandin and Buck Brannaman both pioneered ways to improve animal lives, by getting deep enough in animal heads to see how to avoid terrorizing them. Temple deals with cattle, Buck with horses. Terrorizing animals less also helps humans who deal with them.

Some lessons:

1) Neither is a purist. Both accept that animals often suffer, and are slaves of humans. Both work within the current system to make animals lives better, even if the result falls short of their ideals. Compromising with bad is often essential to doing good.

2) Though are similarly insightful, Grandin has a far bigger impact, as her innovations are embodied in physical capital, e.g., the layout of large plants, chosen by large firms. She has revolutionized an industry. In contrast, Brannaman’s innovations are embodied in human capital chosen by small organizations. While Brannaman is personally impressive, it is far from clear how much practice people like him have really changed. Capital intensity does indeed promote innovation.

3) Many doubt that we should feel bad about animal suffering, because they doubt animal minds react like human minds to force, pain, etc. The impressive abilities of Grandin and Brannaman to predict animal behavior by imagining themselves in animal situations supports their claim that cattle and horse fear and suffering is recognizably similar to human fear and suffering. I tentatively accept that such animals are afraid and suffer in similar ways to humans, with similar types of emotions and feelings, even if they cannot think or talk as abstractly about their suffering.

4) The fact that animals are slaves does not imply that animal lives have no value, or that nothing can effect that value. Slavery need not be worse than death, and usually isn’t. A future where the vast majority of our descendants are slaves could still be a glorious future, even if not as glorious as a future where they are not slaves.

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Bashing Billionaires

By Robin Hanson · August 26, 2011 10:30 pm · Comments (26)

Steve Jobs stepped down from his post as CEO of Apple yesterday. The internet instantly erupted in adulation. … Mr Jobs’s wealth … was built in no small part upon an intellectual-property regime that I and many others believe to retard progress. … Bill Gates used to get plenty of heat from the class warriors, but some time after … [he] devoted a huge portion of his fortune to his charitable foundation, he ascended to a sort of philanthropic secular sainthood. … But Mr Jobs has eschewed charity. …

[Yes,] charity very often does rather less to improve quality of life than selling people ever better products at ever lower prices. But this line of reasoning hasn’t convinced very many of us that, say, Charles and David Koch’s vast wealth is proof of their successful service to humankind. Mr Jobs’s relative immunity from the scorn of those otherwise keen to stick it to billionaires is due, I think, to the admiring pleasure wordsmiths takes in the elegance of the Apple devices they use for work, play, and status-signaling. …

Steve Jobs is a white wizard in wire rims who offers …. mesmerising portals to a better, beautiful, more enchanted world. … So who gives a fig if he doesn’t shower his billions upon worthy causes. … But what about the guys who get rich digging oil out of the ground so we can charge our iPhones? Stick it to ‘em, the greedy bastards. All of which is to say, our intuitions about economic desert and fair distribution are…complicated. (more)

Consider: what elites did foragers worry most about? Foragers worried most about elite capacity for violence, and an inclination to use it. They also worried lots about unequal access to food and shelter, and to tools useful for all these things. So foragers enforced strong norms against giving orders or doing violence, and norms favoring sharing of food, shelter, medicine, and tools. In these senses foragers were egalitarian.

However, foragers worried far less about unequal capacities for art, music, conversation, charm, social popularity, or sex appeal. After all, in a forager world unequal capacities of these sort just couldn’t go anywhere near as horribly wrong as unequal violence or food. Because of this humans seem evolved to tolerate, and even celebrate, unequal abilities in art, popularity, or sex appeal.

Fast forward to today, and consider which billionaires are liked versus disliked. I’d bet that artistic billionaires like Steve Jobs, J.K. Rowling, and Oprah Winfrey are among the most liked, even after one controls for how well know they are. Same for rich actors and talk show hosts. In contrast, billionaires who are merely associated with an ordinary business are probably the least popular.

Note that while it was pretty functional for foragers to tolerate artistic inequality more, an added tolerance today for artistic billionaires over mere business billionaires has few functional benefits. Your added envy and hostility to mere business billionaires is just an arbitrary dysfunctional vestige of times long since past. Yes it might feel better to bash them, but is that really a good enough reason to do so?

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The Beauty Bias

By Robin Hanson · August 11, 2011 12:00 pm · Comments (22)

As I write these words I’m riding a late night train, listening to some beautiful music and noticing a beautiful woman in the aisle opposite. And I can feel with unusual vividness my complete vulnerability to a beauty bias. The careful analytical thoughts I had hours before now seem, no matter what their care or basis, trivial and small by comparison.

If words and coherent thoughts came through this beauty channel, they would feel so much more compelling. If I had to choose between beauty and something plain or ugly, I would be so so eager to find excuses to choose beauty. If I needed to believe beauty was stronger or more moral or better for the world, reasons would be found, and it would feel easy to accept them.

This all horrifies the part of me that wants to believe what is true, based on some coherent and fair use of reasons and analysis. But I can see how very inadequate I am to resist it. The best I can do, it seems, is to not form beliefs or opinions while attending to beauty. Such as by avoiding music with non-trivial lyrics. And by wariness of opinions regarding a divide where one side is more beautiful. (Yes Tyler, this does question my taste for elegant theoretical simplicity.)

I have little useful advice here, alas, other than: know your limits. If you cannot help but to fall into a ditch if you walk nearby, then keep away, or accept that you’ll fall in.

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Art Is Power

By Robin Hanson · February 16, 2011 10:00 am · Comments (8)

The movie Howl helped me to understand a role art can play in the politics of regulation. Art done well can have a very high status, a status which transfers to the actions used to create or express this art, as well as to the actions depicted by the art.  And by making some examples of an action high status, one reduces political support for regulations limiting such actions.

For example, since most folks are uncomfortable with explicit sexual conversation in public, obscenity laws limit such public conversation. But when artists create high quality and hence high status art with explicit sexual discussion, people are reluctant to let obscenity laws apply to it.  So they’ll either have to make an exception in obscenity law for high status art, which will lead to many disputes since art evaluation can be subjective, or they’ll have to just allow a lot more public obscenity. Similarly, having high status art depicting homosexuality, being created by them, reduces support for laws against homosexuality.

Of course this can also work the other way – high quality art that presents a low opinion of an example of some type of action can raise support for regulations limiting such actions. So the power of art isn’t only a libertarian power – it is a power of status, which can be directed toward many ends. But since art is an expression, it will more often conflict with laws forbidding expressions than with other sorts of laws, and so will tend to push for freer expression.

So does art tends to be a force for political good? Well if you favor freer expression, you’ll think so. But beyond that, it depends on the taste and judgment of the artists, relative to the many other forces pushing for more or less regulation. I suppose I’ll give artists the benefit of the doubt, and assume they helps a little, just as I’ll presume all other sources help a little on average. But it would sure be nice to get better data to make a more refined judgment.

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Artists As Foragers

By Robin Hanson · December 13, 2010 6:00 am · Comments (16)

William Easterly in yesterday’s Post:

For so many of my generation, growing up in the 1960s and 1970s, Lennon was a hero, not just for his music but for his fearless activism against the Vietnam War. … The closest counterpart to Lennon now is U2′s Bono, … championing … the battle against global poverty. But there is a fundamental difference between Lennon’s activism and Bono’s. … Lennon was a rebel. Bono is not. Lennon’s protests against the war in Vietnam so threatened the U.S. government that he was hounded by the FBI, police and immigration authorities. … Bono, by contrast, … does not challenge power but rather embraces it; he is more likely to appear in photo ops with international political leaders – or to travel through Africa with a Treasury secretary. … There is something inherently noble about the celebrity dissident, but there is something slightly ridiculous about the celebrity wonk. (more)

If you thought artists had special insight into politics, policy, or their underlying morality, and so sought political info from them, you would not presume to know the info they had to convey in particular cases. You would wait to hear from them if they thought any particular power should be supported or criticized. Instead Easterly here is disappointed that today’s artist celebrities criticize today’s policies, not its powers, because he thinks artists should always criticize power. Artists are so much not info sources to Easterly as allies he wants to rely on to support his anti-power political side. Why?

Artists are iconic foragers, seen as promiscuous, leisurely, non-materialistic, non-domineering, well-traveled, etc. In our great political conflicts between forager and farmer styles, we expect artists to take the forager side. So Easterly complains that the politics of celebrities like Bono doesn’t seem sufficiently forager-like. The great divide continues.

More Easterly quotes: Continue reading "Artists As Foragers" »

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Real Creativity

By Robin Hanson · November 13, 2010 2:00 pm · Comments (12)

Munira Mirza’s ’08 review of Creativity: Unconventional Wisdom from 20 Accomplished Minds:

The editors’ corporate conceptualisation of ‘creativity’ makes this collection about as exciting as a the spring show from Marks and Spencers. … What is creativity? … the respondents give a rather similar (and by the end of the book, dull) answer – it’s thinking out of the box, it’s breaking the rules, it’s challenging convention. …

In fact, creative people don’t think of themselves as ‘creatives’ with a particular mentality to boot (unless, of course, they run a creative consultancy, in which case it’s necessary for promotional purposes). They think of themselves as novelists, engineers, software designers, journalists, artists, and so on. … They make things and are preoccupied with the things they make, unbothered with developing a ‘creative’ mentality. … It is their engagement with their chosen activity that drives them, rather than some kind of personal predisposition or character type. …

We live in a society obsessed with cultivating the creative mind: on this view, the mental attitude is all that matters, regardless of what end product it actually makes. This shift has taken place most profoundly in arts education. … And now, we have a deluge of state sponsored initiatives to encourage creativity in people (creative industries, Creative Partnerships, creative quarters, etc) but a dearth of the skills that allow people to create. …

There are many examples in the book when creativity is shown to be a team effort, rather than the spark of an individual genius …. Creativity is also something that requires hard work and intellectual energy, rather than spontaneity. … Karl Marx pointed out that when people engage in creative labour they are required to pay close attention both to the concrete practice of creating, and the conceptualisation of the end product. (more; HT Rachel Armstrong)

Yup.  I’ll admit it; Murina’s more (academic-style) articulate than I on the subject.

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Concept Artists

By Robin Hanson · October 22, 2010 7:45 pm · Comments (11)

Back in ’94 I won an electronic arts prize, and spent a weekend in Austria with artists. They had declared me a “concept artist” and we discussed what that meant. I felt deja vu Thursday when I presented at the Parsons New School of Design, and after talked with professors of design and architecture (audio, slides; vid). It seems to me that they are also concept artists, though they might not embrace this description, and this made me wonder again how many intellectuals are concept artists.

A painter arranges paint on a canvas in a pattern that other artists judge to be pretty or provocative or intriguing, or, well anything really that they respect enough to call “art.” While they have no explicit standards, they can roughly articulate many features that all-else-equal make paintings better, and communities of artists usually have enough consensus on what they like to together rate paintings as good or bad. It is similar for sculpture, movies, novels, etc. — communities of artists develop common enough implicit standards so that they agree enough on what is good art.

Similar standards of evaluation can be applied to concepts, ideas, and claims. To the naive, “concept artists” may sound like they intend mainly to make claims about reality, and to evaluate those claims in terms of how well they cohere with each other and data about reality. But in fact concept artists evaluate claims more the way most any artists evaluates art – in terms of beauty, elegance, provocation, intrigue, etc. This can make concept artists a bit more tolerant of ambiguity, logical gaps, etc., though the difference can be subtle – being too obviously tolerant of such things usually isn’t good art.

Concept artists aren’t really my style of intellectual, but I must admit that the fact that conceptual artists are not primarily focused on the truth of their claims does not prevent them from achieving insight and contributing to intellectual progress.  Truth be old, most other intellectuals also are not first and foremost trying to find truth. Yet intellectual progress is often a side effect of their activities. It is much harder than you might think to say which intellectual styles best find truth in what contexts.

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