More on the subject of your footnotes 1 and 2 than your post, I was shocked at how instantly, when I turned thirty, my gut reactions flipped from "I love how the younger generations are experimenting with the boundaries of music" (100 gecs, mumble rap, tiktok 30 second songs) to "This isn't music and you're morally flawed for liking it" (suno basically)
Outside view, this is probably what every generation has felt as they aged.
Inside view, I'm objectively right that this development is bad, while previous generations were closed minded and lame.
1I'm glad you picked up on that, because this in itself is a very strange phenomena that while intuitively makes sense in a "can't teach a dog new tricks" sort of way, again, there's no clear answer for. And I wonder if it carries over to other things - film, literature, coding language.
Paradoxically I see a lot of boomer-generation engineers who dismiss younger people loving analog technology, wanting to record on tape. They are very neophilic, espousing the view "good god why,!? digital is objectively better! DAWs and Protools are so much cleaner and you have so much more control!".
No, that was a Fake Explanation, a "because" that doesn't actually hold any anticipatory beliefs. "...because, Nepobaby" is functionally the same as saying"because, magic!"
It does hold anticipatory beliefs, indeed your very next paragraph references some. If her popularity was primarily the result of family connections and wealth, then you would expect certain things about her rise to prominence and ongoing popularity to be rather different then if her popularity was primarily the result of grass roots efforts, competitive advantages or an overwhelming preference for her music.
It doesn’t explain, causally, anything about how that money was deployed, or how she was marketed. It doesn’t elucidate what strategies and tactics were used by her P.R., Management, and Label to get so ubiquitous.
I mean, you (I presume) know causal mechanisms by which money, social connections and popularity of a parent can be used to promote one's career and even foster talent in the first place.
You don't need to explain the precise details of the causal mechanisms employed in a specific instance to posit there was causal relationship. Of course, if you can give the precise causal relationships and specifically evidence them, that is a much stronger explanation but even without that you can reasonably posit a causal relationship.
totally discounting the possibility that people genuinely dig her music!
It does not discount that possibility. Indeed, positing she is popular because "people genuinely dig her music" is no stronger and quite possibly a weaker casual explanation. But even if we assume they are equal cases, one does not exclude the other. A causing C does not discount the possibility that B causes C.
1If her popularity was primarily the result of family connections and wealth, then you would expect certain things about her rise to prominence and ongoing popularity to be rather different then if her popularity was primarily the result of grass roots efforts, competitive advantages or an overwhelming preference for her music.
You've made me realize something - no it doesn't hold anticipatory beliefs because: I can't tell the difference between grassroots popular and not.
I mean, you (I presume) know causal mechanisms by which money, social connections and popularity of a parent can be used to promote one's career and even foster talent in the first place.
Not really. If you gave me the same money and connections - could I replicate those results? Probably not. I think it's akin to how I know that the teacher's password for "why are slick racing tires faster than grooved" and I say "because more surface area in contact with the track surface creates more friction". Which doesn't even make sense to me, because don't you want less friction so you can go faster?
"Her family used lots of money to get popular" doesn't explain anything any more than "more friction".
It does not discount that possibility.
I've expressed myself poorly there - I was discounting the possibility in a elitist "you can tell people to pretend to like anything" sort of way. And I don't like that I reflexively do that. But you're right - both can be true in the real world.
"Her family used lots of money to get popular" doesn't explain anything any more than "more friction".
I mean, it explains it in the same way that saying "they got lung cancer because of cigarettes" is an explanation. Cigarettes don't magically cause cancer from their existence, but there are a lot of causal relationships between cigarettes and lung cancer.
You don't even need to know a causal mechanism to determine there is likely a causal relationship (though it helps).
If you gave me the same money and connections - could I replicate those results?
The majority of smokers don't get lung cancer. That doesn't mean that smoking didn't cause lung cancer in the smokers who do get lung cancer.
With cancer and fame there are a lot of highly stochastic influences.
Nice post! Punchy, and I like your writing style. I encounter this problem all the time among tpot/rats. People often like answers more than they like truth, so they ask a question, get an answer, and gleefully glue it into their mental scrapbook without a second thought. I came up with the scrapbook metaphor as I was typing but now I like it. It's like, "look at all these answers I found!"
If I’m confused or curious about something, I take that to mean I don’t understand it.
This should work in reverse: when an answer to a question satisfies my curiosity, or stops me wondering, does that mean I understand?
Not necessarily.
The example that comes to mind is seemingly overnight going from never hearing of Gracie Abrams, to literally Spotify overriding my play queue to force me to listen to her. [1]So now I was curious – how did, overnight, she become so ubiquitous?
It wasn’t long before I saw her name next to the term “Nepobaby”.
Ah, it's because she's a Nepobaby! Her father is a famous TV producer and film director who, I assume, threw money at her career. Mystery solved. That explains everything, doesn’t it?
No, that was a Fake Explanation, a "because" that doesn't actually hold any anticipatory beliefs. "...because, Nepobaby" is functionally the same as saying"because, magic!"
It doesn’t explain, causally, anything about how that money was deployed, or how she was marketed. It doesn’t elucidate what strategies and tactics were used by her P.R., Management, and Label to get so ubiquitous. It’s also contemptibly elitist[2] and totally discounting the possibility that people genuinely dig her music!
It was a satisfying explanation for me. But it isn’t an explanation at all.
Yes, one slice of humble pie please.
Even the alternative hypothesis I has the air of Fake Explanation. I’m old. [3]She has slowly and steadily been building a following over many years, and what I experienced was simply the Baader–Meinhof phenomenon.
Now I’m worried. I have to do a, kind of, mental model inventory: what are all the other phenomena I feel satisfied about my answers to but are just fake explanations?
Obviously not all of my confidence or satisfaction is due to false explanations, but differentiating is gonna suck.
How? I was trying to get my Car Bluetooth to connect to my phone midway through playing a Spotify playlist, sometimes, for reasons I can't fathom: this causes Spotify to wipe your queue. Even if you’re playing a playlist. Instead not playing anything, or even using the oodles of profile data it has to try and algorithmically deliver you tracks that match you profile – it defaults to contemporary middle of the road pop.
I am Principal Skinner in the meme/scene where while staking out a truant Bart Simpson, the trails runs cold. He wonders why there are no young people at any of the places he thought. "Am I so out of touch? no, its the children who are wrong"
There is another meme on the theme of being out of touch with youth culture: "Curtains for Zoosha" has been on my mind a lot. Where a 50 year old compares all contemporary celebrity news to seemingly nonsense words, including the celebrity names.