A week ago I heard Philippe Petit, featured in the respected movie Man on Wire, on a radio show and thought he sounded fun and so I ordered his movie from Netflix. This morning I read about Polanski in the
Isn't it a two-way street, though? Sure, the troubled artist is permitted to be more lax morally, but then the rest of us feel less of a compulsion to contribute to his welfare. The priest, to take this all the way to the other end of the spectrum as far as moral expectations go, has virtually zero leeway in his behavior, but if he needs a helping hand we are much more likely to help him out. So, yes, artists might be able to get away with more, but they don't get that for free.
An underappreciated component of moral motivation is its signaling function in the domain of long-term mate selection. It's less rewarding to cut a good moral figure when your mating opportunities permit more self-indulgent behavior. See Geoffrey Miller on women's preferences for creative men as short-term flings (and across the menstrual cycle), and Julia Pradel on how long-term, but not short-term, relationship desires predict people's attraction to altruistic others.
I think the personality trait that determines whether you act like a dick is conscientiousness. I think that businessmen have a lot of it, even if tycoons don't, and artists have the least.
I think economists, business people and politicians are held to a higher moral standard because they have a position in society that gives them the power to exploit the public for their own selfish benefit. To have an extremely selfish economist, politician or business person could have directly negative consequences for society as a whole, so it makes sense for the public to judge these individuals as such.
On the other hand, although I don't think it's impossible, most artists don't have the power to exploit or dupe the public for their selfish benefit. Even someone like John Grisham, who you could arguably say only writes his novels for the money, is still bringing a lot of pleasure and enjoyment to his readers whenever he does so. Artists are judged by their creation, and whether or not it provides something of use to people on the whole. So, if art is created that brings enjoyment or satisfaction to others, it makes very little difference to the public whether or not the creator of that art was a moral person, which makes sense.
Now if the issue you are trying to describe is that people tend to idolize the individuals whose art they appreciate the most, overlooking their moral failings, yes that is certainly true. But isn't that true of anyone who makes a contribution to society that we enjoy/appreciate? Are artists really unique in this?
I can't remember which book it was but I was reading an Economics book recently and it had a chapter devoted to pretty much this theme... the oversexed artist.
I've kind of made a word up Poiesphobia (poiesis) - fear of the creative or artistic.I consider myself very creative and as a consequence I've notice how this can often subtly cause agitation in people (yes, of course it might be because I'm deluded... blah blah). It might as well be a pheromone... people are as sensitive to it as a shark to blood but they don't wish to seem meanspirited so they are expert at skirting the issue. The fact is, creativity can be very disruptive in terms of social comparison, ranking, self esteem etc.
Good questions. This is a relative space, not an absolute space, what matters is the 'distance' between people in this space, there is a consistent metric (similarity), so distance in rationality space measures the similarity between cognitive styles. Note: It's similarity which is fundamental, not probability.
Insofar as someone needs to communicate something, the optimal mode for that is analogical, so business folks become 'artists' or 'performers' when giving presentations or explaining results, but this doesn't mean its their favored style.
I'd strip away the axis-to-profession identification and just examine the space. So many questions to answer...
(1) Can these three modes of thought be separated in observation?(2) Can variation along an axis be understood much less measured? (What would the origin be? What does being far out along all axes mean? Is your metric space defined consistently across all axes?)(3) How much variation in the world is explicable through these axes versus another rotation or the space?(4) What's the relationship between these thought-patterns and behavior, strategies, and outcomes?
Personally, I find very very few people that use symbolic or probabilistic reasoning. Most people I know in business rely almost exclusively on analogy. My superiors actively avoid discussing either deduction or uncertainty in presentations to their superiors and peers. Instead they ideally find a simple and immediately understandable analogy in which the reasoning has already been done and can be applied without thought to the novel situation.
This makes me think maybe these axes don't provide a lot of explanatory power (because almost everyone is clustered along one axis).
Seems to me artists are *expected* to thumb their noses at the mob, to cut against the grain so to speak. That's a public display,'part of the show' so to speak. As regards private moral behavor, I'd be interested in some stats. I suspect that on average artists are *more* moral, given that those associated with the liberal-arts tend to be more egalitarian.
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I hypothesize a 3-D 'personality space' with politicans/religious folk represented along one dimensional, business/libertarian folk on another dimension, and artistic folks on the third dimension. Let me call these three types of personality: Warriors, Tycoons and Wizards, respectively.
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Could each of the 3 types of personality be associated with a particular cognitive style? Lets assume a 3-D 'rationality space' representing a particular cognitive style.
Warriors (political/religious folks) are more attracted to absolutes - I would expect them to gravitate to a style of thought favoring symbolic logic. So lets place 'symbolic logic' along our first rationality axis.
Tycoons (business/libetarian folks) are more attracted to probabilistic logic.. tools which have a close link to economics after all, so its easy to put 'Bayesian Inference' along the second rationality axis.
Wizards (artist folks) think in analogical terms -in terms of categorizing things, the link between the arts and categorization has been mentioned on this blog before. Thus, 'Categorization' represents the third rationality axis.
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I suggest that the greatest levels of arsehole-like behavior are seen in the warriors (political folks), whereas tycoons (libertarian folks) are nicer but still exhibit alarming amounts of arse-hole like behavior. Finally I suggest the wizards (artist folks) are actually nicest of all.
Is there a natural hierarchy here? Could the cognitive style of wizards weilding analogical inference actually be more powerful than that of tycoons limited to only Bayesian inference? Beware Robin, before insulting the wizards! ;)
I sincerely doubt that most liberals wanted to give Polanski a get-out-of-jail free card. Certainly, I suspect that more liberals than conservatives did, and more artsy/hollywood types did. But I think the Pro-Polanski camp is pretty roundly despised by most people, liberal or conservative.
This has more to do with honesty than anything else. Politicians, social conservative ones in particular, are held to a higher standard in their personal affairs because of how willing they are to condemn private, personal behavior as bad.
Mick Jagger, as far as I know, has never spoke out about marital infidelity, or has even accepted a role that makes it expected for him to condemn it, such as aren't-I-squeaky-clean Tiger Woods.
I know people who have worked on projects (movies, large ventures) where, if they are not the person who gets the lead credit, nevertheless are heard to say “I worked on this project with Tom Hanks, or I worked on this big project and learned y”. Or, bringing it closer to home, how many authors co-author with someone else to get their name associated with that co-author.good point
I need to co-operate with people to pass laws and to do business. In particular, I need to abide by social norms so that I don't abuse my power. I don't need to co-operate with people to make art, as long as everyone else is engaging in the norms that allow me to survive. This is partly because I don't have that much power. Note that this is most true for visual art, with groups from Dada onwards asserting their desire to radically change society. Then you have music, then as you go towards theatre/film this becomes less true and it becomes more like a business wherein the top people in the production exert power over the other participants. We ought to expect the powerless painter to have more free moral action than the powerful businessman.
Isn't it a two-way street, though? Sure, the troubled artist is permitted to be more lax morally, but then the rest of us feel less of a compulsion to contribute to his welfare. The priest, to take this all the way to the other end of the spectrum as far as moral expectations go, has virtually zero leeway in his behavior, but if he needs a helping hand we are much more likely to help him out. So, yes, artists might be able to get away with more, but they don't get that for free.
An underappreciated component of moral motivation is its signaling function in the domain of long-term mate selection. It's less rewarding to cut a good moral figure when your mating opportunities permit more self-indulgent behavior. See Geoffrey Miller on women's preferences for creative men as short-term flings (and across the menstrual cycle), and Julia Pradel on how long-term, but not short-term, relationship desires predict people's attraction to altruistic others.
I think the personality trait that determines whether you act like a dick is conscientiousness. I think that businessmen have a lot of it, even if tycoons don't, and artists have the least.
I think economists, business people and politicians are held to a higher moral standard because they have a position in society that gives them the power to exploit the public for their own selfish benefit. To have an extremely selfish economist, politician or business person could have directly negative consequences for society as a whole, so it makes sense for the public to judge these individuals as such.
On the other hand, although I don't think it's impossible, most artists don't have the power to exploit or dupe the public for their selfish benefit. Even someone like John Grisham, who you could arguably say only writes his novels for the money, is still bringing a lot of pleasure and enjoyment to his readers whenever he does so. Artists are judged by their creation, and whether or not it provides something of use to people on the whole. So, if art is created that brings enjoyment or satisfaction to others, it makes very little difference to the public whether or not the creator of that art was a moral person, which makes sense.
Now if the issue you are trying to describe is that people tend to idolize the individuals whose art they appreciate the most, overlooking their moral failings, yes that is certainly true. But isn't that true of anyone who makes a contribution to society that we enjoy/appreciate? Are artists really unique in this?
I can't remember which book it was but I was reading an Economics book recently and it had a chapter devoted to pretty much this theme... the oversexed artist.
I've kind of made a word up Poiesphobia (poiesis) - fear of the creative or artistic.I consider myself very creative and as a consequence I've notice how this can often subtly cause agitation in people (yes, of course it might be because I'm deluded... blah blah). It might as well be a pheromone... people are as sensitive to it as a shark to blood but they don't wish to seem meanspirited so they are expert at skirting the issue. The fact is, creativity can be very disruptive in terms of social comparison, ranking, self esteem etc.
We let beautiful women get away with more too. Sexually attractive people in general.
Good questions. This is a relative space, not an absolute space, what matters is the 'distance' between people in this space, there is a consistent metric (similarity), so distance in rationality space measures the similarity between cognitive styles. Note: It's similarity which is fundamental, not probability.
Insofar as someone needs to communicate something, the optimal mode for that is analogical, so business folks become 'artists' or 'performers' when giving presentations or explaining results, but this doesn't mean its their favored style.
I'd strip away the axis-to-profession identification and just examine the space. So many questions to answer...
(1) Can these three modes of thought be separated in observation?(2) Can variation along an axis be understood much less measured? (What would the origin be? What does being far out along all axes mean? Is your metric space defined consistently across all axes?)(3) How much variation in the world is explicable through these axes versus another rotation or the space?(4) What's the relationship between these thought-patterns and behavior, strategies, and outcomes?
Personally, I find very very few people that use symbolic or probabilistic reasoning. Most people I know in business rely almost exclusively on analogy. My superiors actively avoid discussing either deduction or uncertainty in presentations to their superiors and peers. Instead they ideally find a simple and immediately understandable analogy in which the reasoning has already been done and can be applied without thought to the novel situation.
This makes me think maybe these axes don't provide a lot of explanatory power (because almost everyone is clustered along one axis).
Seems to me artists are *expected* to thumb their noses at the mob, to cut against the grain so to speak. That's a public display,'part of the show' so to speak. As regards private moral behavor, I'd be interested in some stats. I suspect that on average artists are *more* moral, given that those associated with the liberal-arts tend to be more egalitarian.
---
I hypothesize a 3-D 'personality space' with politicans/religious folk represented along one dimensional, business/libertarian folk on another dimension, and artistic folks on the third dimension. Let me call these three types of personality: Warriors, Tycoons and Wizards, respectively.
---
Could each of the 3 types of personality be associated with a particular cognitive style? Lets assume a 3-D 'rationality space' representing a particular cognitive style.
Warriors (political/religious folks) are more attracted to absolutes - I would expect them to gravitate to a style of thought favoring symbolic logic. So lets place 'symbolic logic' along our first rationality axis.
Tycoons (business/libetarian folks) are more attracted to probabilistic logic.. tools which have a close link to economics after all, so its easy to put 'Bayesian Inference' along the second rationality axis.
Wizards (artist folks) think in analogical terms -in terms of categorizing things, the link between the arts and categorization has been mentioned on this blog before. Thus, 'Categorization' represents the third rationality axis.
--
I suggest that the greatest levels of arsehole-like behavior are seen in the warriors (political folks), whereas tycoons (libertarian folks) are nicer but still exhibit alarming amounts of arse-hole like behavior. Finally I suggest the wizards (artist folks) are actually nicest of all.
Is there a natural hierarchy here? Could the cognitive style of wizards weilding analogical inference actually be more powerful than that of tycoons limited to only Bayesian inference? Beware Robin, before insulting the wizards! ;)
I sincerely doubt that most liberals wanted to give Polanski a get-out-of-jail free card. Certainly, I suspect that more liberals than conservatives did, and more artsy/hollywood types did. But I think the Pro-Polanski camp is pretty roundly despised by most people, liberal or conservative.
This has more to do with honesty than anything else. Politicians, social conservative ones in particular, are held to a higher standard in their personal affairs because of how willing they are to condemn private, personal behavior as bad.
Mick Jagger, as far as I know, has never spoke out about marital infidelity, or has even accepted a role that makes it expected for him to condemn it, such as aren't-I-squeaky-clean Tiger Woods.
Isn't that sort of expected of male rock stars?
I know people who have worked on projects (movies, large ventures) where, if they are not the person who gets the lead credit, nevertheless are heard to say “I worked on this project with Tom Hanks, or I worked on this big project and learned y”. Or, bringing it closer to home, how many authors co-author with someone else to get their name associated with that co-author.good point
I need to co-operate with people to pass laws and to do business. In particular, I need to abide by social norms so that I don't abuse my power. I don't need to co-operate with people to make art, as long as everyone else is engaging in the norms that allow me to survive. This is partly because I don't have that much power. Note that this is most true for visual art, with groups from Dada onwards asserting their desire to radically change society. Then you have music, then as you go towards theatre/film this becomes less true and it becomes more like a business wherein the top people in the production exert power over the other participants. We ought to expect the powerless painter to have more free moral action than the powerful businessman.
Thomas Kincaid is one of the great artists of our time and he would be welcome at Christmas dinner let me tell you!
Being an artist is no reason not to participate decently in life. Unfortunately, I am unable to define decent, but I recognize decent behaviors.
"A real artist is the one who has learned to recognize and to render… the ‘radiance’ of all things as an epiphany or showing forth of the truth."
Joseph Campbell (1904-1987)