Comment by stavros
5 hours ago
Judging by the comments here, I'm the only one, but I have no idea what he's talking about. Even the abstract:
> The act of creation is fractal exploration–exploitation under optimal feedback control. When resolution increases the portion of parameter space that doesn't make the artifact worse (acceptance volume) collapses. Verification latency and rate–distortion combine into a precision tax that scales superlinearly with perceived quality.
Is this just saying that it's ok if doodles aren't good, but the closer you get to the finished work, the better it has to be? If your audience can't understand what the hell you're talking about for simple ideas, you've gone too far.
This kind of article is why people read comments first today.
It's such a simple idea. And it already has a name, diminishing returns. I don't know what prompted this article but it wasn't insight.
"The last 10% take 90% of the time"
The author had a shower thought. It was poorly explored, poorly argued and deliberately packaged in complex language to hide the lack of substance. The bibtex reference at the end is the cherry on top.
Hey, I have my share of poorly-explored showethought posts, but at least I don't try to ornament them in sesquipedalian locution that purposely obfuscates the rudimentariness of the notion.
You waste time when few word do trick
Hate to comment on the medium or writing style instead of the content but you're not alone. I understand the terms in the article in isolation or used in other fields, but it seems like the author is using a lot of technical metaphors. Or maybe I'm not their sophisticated audience.
The abstract is some of the worst writing I've read in a while. Trying to sound so very smart while being incapable of getting your point across. This whole article reeks of pretentiousness.
It would be clearer with a comma after "increases". Without that it's a garden-path sentence:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garden-path_sentence
You read "increases" as a transitive verb, and then reach the "collapses" at the end of the sentence and have to re-parse the whole thing when you realize it was really intransitive.
Yeah, to date I think the smartest writing/speaking I've seen was Feynman. The way he could explain complicated physics concepts in simple words is just unmatched.
Feynman's Physics lectures are proof of that: https://www.feynmanlectures.caltech.edu/
10/10 should be required reading for all humans
Yeah, it came off as complete nonsense. If someone were talking to me like this in person, I'd probably start suspecting they were doing it to distract me while their friend was outside stealing my hubcaps.
I had to think way too hard about what the author was trying to say. It smacks of an attempt at precise language, yet the subject matter is not precise at all. The author commits a Paul Grahamism, assuming their personal experience is generalizable and uniform.
Certainly, some artists work in the way they describe. Maybe even "most", who knows. But there are plenty of artists that do not. I've known plenty of artists to go straight to the detail in one corner of their piece and work linearly all the way across and down the canvas. I don't know how they do it, it certainly doesn't work for me, but obviously different people work in different ways.
In defense of Paul Graham, his essays are often unnecessarily long, but I don't remember he has written something as bad as this abstract.
It's more on par with something you'll find on lesswrong.