xkcd raises an interesting issue or three. Click to see the exciting conclusion, starring Joe Biden.
Naturally, in less time than it takes to eat a sandwich there was a Tumblr account dedicated to Joe Biden eating.
But one can’t help but ask — is it true? Does it really not matter what it is we choose to lavish our attentions upon? Would we find as much depth and complexity in different cans of Diet Dr. Pepper as oenophiles would claim are lurking in a bottle of fine Bordeaux?
I think we have to say no. Some things really are more complex and nuanced than other things. I could provide examples, but they aren’t any better than ones you can imagine yourself.
That’s okay, it doesn’t make the comic any less funny. And there is a clever point that remains true: people pick and choose the things on which they lavish their attention. To one person, all jazz is just noise; another would say the same about classical, and another about punk. The real issue isn’t the existence of complexity, it’s how we choose to recognize and value it. If we went through life taking note of every fact around us, we’d go insane within minutes. Making sense of existence relies heavily on coarse-graining.
But there’s yet another issue! (Yes I know I’m spending too much time analyzing a single comic — or am I deviously making a point?) The cartoon didn’t choose Diet Dr. Pepper as its example, it chose pictures of Joe Biden eating sandwiches. And you know, there really is a lot of depth there. There’s a lot you could say about a large collection of such photographs. So the question is — are any of those things worth saying? Complexity might be necessary for great art, but it doesn’t seem to be sufficient. Paying attention to certain kinds of details seems rewarding in a way that paying attention to others is not.
Anyone have a simple demarcation between the two? When is complexity deserving of study, and when does it merit being ignored? I’m sure aestheticians have argued about this for centuries, and I’m not trying to break any new ground here. I’m just at a loss for a good theory, which isn’t a condition I like to be in.
The fact that some inexpensive wines can outscore some expensive wines does not prove that there is no distinction in quality: It could easily be the case that they are not “brand name” and are thus under-appreciated.
Although I make no effort to become a connoisseur of wine, I do recall an inadvertent test: Many years ago, I attended a party given by the wife of one of the early PC-riche (nouveau-riche before becoming nouveau-crashed). She ordered what was, at the time, an extremely expensive bottle of wine. (OK, I was a graduate student, so my standards were not that high; but hear me out.) It was really good. For a second round, she ordered something that was half the price: still expensive, but not socks off-knockingly so. When I first had a taste of the second wine, I almost spat it out: Compared to the first, it was almost like drinking gasoline. There being nothing else on offer, I kept drinking. The second taste was OK. The third taste was decent. The fourth taste was quite good.
So I think that there is such a thing as quality (or qualities) in wine, and that you can train to become aware of them. However, unless you plan to become a professional oenophile, there may not be any advantage to doing so.
“Artistic observation can obtain an almost mystical depth. The objects on which it falls loose their names. Light and shade form very particular systems… but get their existence and value from a certain accord of the soul, the eye and hand of someone who was born to perceive them and evoke them in her own inner self.” Paul Valery
“Anyone have a simple demarcation between the two? When is complexity deserving of study, and when does it merit being ignored? I’m sure aestheticians have argued about this for centuries, and I’m not trying to break any new ground here. I’m just at a loss for a good theory, which isn’t a condition I like to be in.”
I think the principle by which you can distinguish whether a complexity is deserving a study can be derived from both physics and art at the same time. Some posts ago you said that we have taken samples of the moon but not from every cubic inch of it (which always allows for the possibility for the moon to be made of green cheese – my favorite 🙂 ). But we know better, from what we have systematized as knowledge so far we know what the structure of the information we are exploring should be, so we just pay attention to specific key-points that would define whether we would have a gas giant or a rocky planet, or a satellite like the Moon.
On the other hand there is art. And art theory says that every good composition is characterized with “variety in the unity and unity in the variety.” So there are some single “spikes”, some objects or items that seem very clear and monochromatic at first sight, but if you examine them in detail – you see great variety. There is also these items that have great variety but if you study them just a little bit – you see the unity in them, the pattern through which you can only explore 1% of the whole item, but know it as if you had studied 100%.
So I guess that’s the principle which could guide you to know whether there is a merit in thoroughly exploring a specific complexity. If you can know this complexity by studying just a small fraction of it (like the structure of a border-less crystal) – it’s not worth going too much in depth. But if you see a singularity that contains a great variety inside (e.g. plasma) – it’s worth observing and studying it until you know the essence of this variety.
At least that’s what I can derive from physics and art…
Santa Barbara Pinots on the horizon.
Video Games.
To those who don’t play them, video games are the ultimate trite and pointless pasttime. To those that do, where are entire spectra of genres, nuance and quality.
Let’s take something most people are familiar with. Super Mario Bros. Did you know that Super Mario Bros is in fact a rather “deep” game. Deep in the sense that while the basic rules are simple(move left-right, duck, jump, hold b to run), the game engine nevertheless has subtleties to it that make gameplay flexible and which allow a breathtaking possibility of moves and strategies to be performed.
Remember the Many Worlds Interpretation Super Mario World Video. That continuum of possibilities for Mario’s journey simply wouldn’t have been possible or feasible on a less flexible game engine. The best games take simple rules and allow the player to plumb the depths of their possible outcomes, using only the subtle nuances of the engine.
By contrast you can have a “game” like Microsoft Flight Simulator, which despite the enormous and bewildering array of controls in the aircraft cockpit, ultimately offers a less flexible gameplay experience, as most actions will simply crash the plane. This game is complex, but it does not have the same depth or breadth.
Complexity in Super Mario does not arise from the amount of rules, but rather from their flexibility. Using only a few dozen block, controls, enemies and power ups, a gargantuan space of levels and manoeuvres is possible. But all the while using only ~8 buttons.
You can liken this to mathematics. Using only a few simple rules for numbers: addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, differentiation, integration,… almost all of physics in the real world can be explained using equations. Mathematics is not complex because there are many rules, but rather because the rules and their combinations are so flexible. Their possibilities are endless, but ordered enough so that the world can be explained using them.
By contrast, pictures of someone eating a sandwich, while numerous, are not flexible. As there are no rules to extend the pictures beyond their basic forms, ultimately their combinations and possibilities will run out. And extending to an infinite amount of pictures does not improve on the situation, where we end up with The Library of Babel, in which a library containing all possible books contains the same information as no books.
If we have too many independent rules, procedures, and operations, then we may as well have no rules at all. Proper complexity arises from rules that are finite yet flexible; rules that are simple, but which allow a wide variety of possible configurations. Complexity which arises from simplicity is more interesting and more worthy of study precisely because it arises from simplicity. It is almost within our understanding, yet we must grow our boundaries of knowledge to fully understand it.
I’m surprised there hasn’t been any mention of Foucault.
So either taste is completely arbitrary or we have some concrete deflation of what is and isn’t good. Seems like a tall ask considering the trouble we have in defining something considered as objective as mathematics as logically consistent.
Complexity is interesting for me when it hangs together in the context of some unifying principle. When it does it becomes art or science, otherwise its ordinary life.
When it comes to watching football, I have consciously chosen (assuming free will exists) to remain ignorant about the strategies and subtle nuances of playing the game so that I can still enjoy watching a game that is being badly played by either or both teams. The same is true for wine. I enjoy tw0-buck Chuck probably as much as a wine expert enjoys a $50.00 bottle of wine. That is, of course, difficult to measure.
Interesting discussion, but I’m constrained to point out that most have forgotten the one word in the title that makes the difference: snobby.
I think that it might be considered connoiseurship to be able to critique endless pictures of Joe Biden eating a sandwich, or some other such pedestrian item; but no one would consider it snobby.
Wine; art; music, especially classical; connoisseurship in these areas would be considered snobby.
And I think it comes down to self-definition. Snobs have snobby interests. Snobby connoisseurship depends, in part, on the attitude of the connoisseur. If the connoisseur considers him/herself better than the hoi polloi, and that his/her interest is evidence of such, and that some simple bourgeois would never be able to develop such an interest…then you have a snobby connoisseurship.
The point is not to lavish attention on a Dr Pepper. The point is to just enjoy it, like the cheap wine.
There are so many presuppositions to the question, each of which must be treated as virtually axiomatic, required to even address it, I’m not sure if I can.
The trouble first arises when we are confronted, quite necessarily, with the need to answer the question of what makes us take special notice anything at all. It could be a “delicious” aroma, an “elegant” portrait, a “gorgeous” sunset, a “voluptuous” pair of breasts, etc.
So I’ll just throw all caution to the wind and turn to evo-psyche. What does the received wisdom of that discipline tell me? Well, maybe we’re primed, wired, whatever, to fixate on certain qualities because they are at least reminiscent of much more prosaic things that are “worthy” of pursuit from a purely survival and/or reproductive vantage. Perhaps a rough consensus that there exists “good” wine, “fine” art, “haute” couture, things that really are generally thought to rise “above the dregs”, can be achieved because on average we’re turned on by the same mundane things. Some of us just have keener senses. People who are able to succeed as professional wine tasters really do, in a quite objective way, have highly sensitized gustation and olfaction. I imagine those sorts of people become “pioneers” of sorts, leading the hoi polloi down the direction that their senses tell them to follow. unlike them, even when we get there, we may not really perceive the world they experience. At least, not without training.
But because they know from good, and because they can convince us of the same, we either kid ourselves that we “get it”, or we learn to pick the signal they hear like a clarion call from the noise, and get a hint of what’s so wonderful. Naturally we look for that in other places. Somewhere in our brains these stimuli are perceived as “good” or “worthy” of pursuit because we’re feeling the same sorts of things that we feel when nourished, loved, post-coital, whatever keeps us alive and provides “well-being” in more practical terms.
And some of us are just “perverse”, but they have the same convictions as the less “aesthetically challenged”. These folks may be the scatologists, dorks, aspies of the world, fixated on things that the majority find perplexing or repugnant. Those individuals get the dopamine rush from things that in no way resemble food, or love, or sex. Quite the contrary, in some cases, these people gravitate to the bitter, the painful, the diseased, things we’re inclined by nature to avoid. Curiously, because fearful and pleasurable arousal induce some of the same physiological and psychological changes, less “perverse” individuals can be trained to develop a “taste” for the naturally repellent. “Acquired tastes” they call these, be it for the bitterest beer, the crassest kitsch, or maybe something like S&M.
Anyway, that’s the best I can come up with.
(Sorry I commented on the wrong post.)
It’s a matter of velocity vs. equilibrium. When we are in a hurry, content only matters as to its trackability, but when we are moving slowly, the area of awareness expands. People who obsess over details are filling up sensory gaps because they have the time, or the need.
I have been toying with the idea, for a long time, that a mathematical description of Sean’s question is possible. The concept is based upon fractal theory.
Fractal equations seem to plot out the boundaries between regions of chaos and those of order. Chaotic regions contain no patterns at all. Those of order contain lots of patterns but those patterns are typically both simple and rigid.
The boundary regions are the most interesting. They contain elements of both order and disorder. It’s the chaos that provides the diversity and interest. The ordering principles that make patterns and give you something to study, to predict.
Therefore the most interesting topics of study should be describable in some way, as a fractal equation. A region of order nudged out of complete predictability by chaos.
Just a thought.
I think we have to say no. Some things really are more complex and nuanced than other things.
Snobby Physicists. Making the subjective objective since 1687.
Sensory experience has a fractal dimension; you can cover the same amount of absolute sense space as someone else without actually sensing even a fraction of what they have because sensory experience gets more complex with depth than with breadth (usually). To taste an asparagus note in a Riesling you have to have tastes a lot of Riesling and know what Riesling “should” taste like — or more precisely, the cluster of flavors that is common to Rieslings vs. the flavors that distinguish different Rieslings.
Some phenomena have higher dimension than others and those ones keep yielding surprises the deeper one goes. The space of tastes produced by wines has a higher dimension than the space of tastes produced by Dr. Pepper; there’s more “there,” which you could probably figure out just by comparing chemical analyses of the two liquids. There’s more to listen to in any of Bach’s symphonies than there is in any of Buddy Holly’s albums (although I’d personally probably rather listen to Buddy Holly).
So yeah, it matters. If you obsess over Dr. Pepper or Buddy Holly you’re going to hit diminishing returns faster than if you obsess over wine or Bach. On the other hand, using the complexity of something to say that it’s objectively “better” than something else — wine is BETTER than Dr. Pepper — is begging the question. You’re essentially defining “good” to be a synonym for “complex.” Whether or not a particular phenomenon is “complex” is a fact about that phenomenon whereas “good” and “bad” are inevitably subjective value judgments. If you doubt this, consider the infinite varieties of excrement in terms of smell, texture, etc. Poop is incredibly complex but people aren’t lining up to smell it.
I get called a “music snob” pretty much exactly when I give clear, specific reasons for why I don’t like a particular piece or artist. Being a “snob” seems to be more about disagreeing with the value judgments of others who can’t marshal specific arguments for why they disagree. If the person can marshal such arguments, they typically just argue instead of calling you a snob.
#34 comes closest to the answer, but doesn’t quite get there. Despite other commenters’ references to various schools of philosophy and criticism, one fact remains true: I enjoy what I enjoy. If I strongly dislike the flavor of a particular highly-regarded wine, does that make the leading arbiters of oenophilic taste wrong? No. But does it make me wrong? No.
Much energy is wasted in tying to turn the subjective into the objective. One should be able to describe the reasons that one holds a certain opinion. If those who hold an opposing opinion cannot do so, their opinions aren’t necessarily incorrect or even invalid.
So, just to add to all that has been said: the Scots say “that there is a Scotch for every taste, but there is no taste for every Scotch.” Now, i much prefer the Islay single malts, smoky peat and all, and i truly detest the Highlands and most of the other isles. Is it taste? Certainly! Is it all Scotch taste? Nay! Do i complain? Never!
I am also very proud of actually knowing the one person described by Audiophile magazine as the pickiest audiophile in the world. He is a dear sweet friend, who has created a vast array of extraordinarily sophisticated machines, for physicists in CA, who are seeking to find strange particles amongst the noise of space. However, his single-minded devotion, is to recreate acoustic sound to perfection on sound reinforcement equipment. No single person spends as much time, energy, and money, as my friend does on this quest that he has been on for more than 45 years. Good lordy, the debate on the proper tuning of the key of “A” alone, is a staggering tribute to this strange and wonderful aficionado of the perfect music experience.