Comment by raincole
3 months ago
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.
3 months ago
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.
Except that's the exact opposite of the takeaway, diminishing return problems are easy. He's proposing a model for why often art does the exact opposite and produces super-linear returns.
It's a common experience for an artist that everything they're doing to a piece makes it look like a total failure and far below the quality they were aspiring to until they do one final layer of polish and the piece transforms from sub-par to spectacular at the final stage. Of course, there are also scenarios where no amount of polish can fix it because the artist simply wasn't good enough and didn't find the right decisions at the final stage and other scenarios where there were no right decisions and no amount of skill could have fixed fatal flaws earlier in the decision making.
The exquisite agony of art is that all 3 scenarios feel subjectively almost identical in the middle of the creation process and so much of art is hoping we come up with some reliable process of divination to tease apart the micro-differences that give you an indication of what path you're on.
OP is proposing a model for why this is this is the case but unless you're an experienced creative, you don't understand the problem phenomena that this is identifying in the first place.