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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   3305 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for February 3, 2023

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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How coincidental is it that the only field where the old masters outclass us is one where the judgement is purely subjective?

Surely not coincidental, but there's a simple possible causative path: objective judgement lets us identify what characteristics of previous work were worth keeping, which lets us keep them while discarding others, which almost forces new work to be an improvement. Is it really surprising that the fields where we're making less improvement are also the ones where we're half-blindly groping?

I think the need for originality is also a constraint on new art. If you tweak the ideas behind "Light-Emitting Diode" to retain the functionality with a shorter-wavelength output, you can earn a Nobel Prize. But if you could tweak the ideas behind "War and Peace" to retain the impact with a shorter text, would you even bother? Perhaps your masterwork could be published as a Readers Digest Condensed Book under a pseudonym. This isn't because War and Peace was at some perfect local optimum of concision upon which no incremental improvement can be made, it's because the very idea of incremental improvement isn't necessarily considered an improvement in the world of literature; it's considered somewhere between "derivative" and "plagiarism" depending on how small the increment is and on how close to "the canon" the inspiration is.

The disparagement of derivative literature and incremental improvements on classic stories seems to me to be a quite modern development linked with the strengthening of copyright protections in the west. Early epics like the Odyssey were probably composed iteratively over many centuries and you can trace characters in Shakespeare's plays all the way back to Ovid. Our modern equivalents would be comic book and movie characters like Batman and the Joker, whose stories continue to be retold in (sometimes) new and exciting ways. Of course, it's still the case that the things that make one iteration of these stories better than another are less objective and more culture-dependent than something like mechanical engineering.

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