Variations on a theme.
Art vs. entertainment
In "An Elevated Wind Music" (2000), one of the great American composers Charles Wuorinen writes:
In any medium—music, literature, poetry, theatre, dance, the visual arts—entertainment is that which we can receive and enjoy passively, without effort, without our putting anything into the experience. Art is that which requires some initial effort from the receiver, after which the experience received may indeed be entertaining but also transcending as well. Art is like nuclear fusion: you have to put something into it to get it started, but you get more out of it in the end than what you put in. (It takes an expenditure of energy to start the reaction.) Entertainment is its own reward, and the reward is not usually long lasting. Entertainment is a pot of boiling water placed on a cold stove: the heating is fleeting. Art is a pot of cold water put on a hot stove: it may take a while to get going, but when it does it gets hot and stays that way!
Even if we take Wuorinen at his word, this presents a bit of a paradox. Which is better, art or entertainment?
Ok, ok, we can do both, yes. But it's strange that on Wuorinen's theory, entertainment has an infinite return on investment, in a sense! No effort, no putting anything in, but we still get something back (however fleeting).
(Of course, we might view even our time and attention as investments; and then Art might start to look like often a better investment than entertainment.)
Portuguese pavement
Allegedly, if one walks around in Restauradores Square in Lisbon, the capital of Portugal, one might be walking on this:
This is a Portuguese traditional way of paving walking spaces. (Lots more examples in the wiki article.) This is a bespoke, labor-intensive method, where you manually lay small individual stones in a pattern special to the one walkway you're making. The result speaks for itself.
An asphalt paver might crank out roadway at 100x or even 1000x the speed of someone manually laying mosaic.
The result is less pleasing, in many ways.
By using more flexible, attention-heavy methods, you get nicer results; but it's much less efficient.
This is not a knock on asphalt pavers. The machines are wonders of modern understanding, and I assume the workers are doing a lot more than one might imagine. What I'm seeing here is just that, while asphalt pavers are far far better at what they do compared to any manual method, they have a ceiling on how nice of a result they can produce. To go much higher than that, you'd need different, probably less efficient methods.
Do I know manim yet?
In June, Rachel Wallis and I (Berkeley Genomics Project) held a conference about reprogenetics. In preparation to publish some of the talks that were given (which you can view here), on a bit of a lark, I spent, like, a week or more quasi-vibecoding an intro animation to go at the beginning (as an accompaniment for a short commissioned piece of music). I used manim (of 3Blue1Brown fame and origin) and gippities.
Now, I definitely learned something about manim.
But I'd be starting from fairly close to zero knowledge if I did another project like that. Why? Well, I didn't try to understand how things worked more in depth than I absolutely needed. This was proooobably the right choice in context, because I just wanted to get the thing done fast. But it meant that I would just ask a gippity for help in several different ways, if something was going wrong, and surprisingly much did go wrong.
So, I did not volatilize the elements of manim that went into making the intro video. I don't have them handy, wieldy, ready to recombine and use to make more difficult things. Volatilization happens when you do the task the right way, even if it's harder in terms of the effort needed to reach the first minimally usable results.
In general, if you don't build it yourself, you don't have the theory of the program. In that linked essay, Dave quotes Naur:
The conclusion seems inescapable that at least with certain kinds of large programs, the continued adaption, modification, and correction of errors in them, is essentially dependent on a certain kind of knowledge possessed by a group of programmers who are closely and continuously connected with them.
Beta
Suppose you're kinda stuck on a boulder problem. What to do?
(How...?)
- Option 1: Keep trying different things, or trying the same things but harder.
- Option 2: Look at a video of someone doing the climb, and then use their beta—just do what they did.
Now, Option 2 certainly works better in the obvious senses. It's easier, and then you know how to do the climb right, and then you can actually do the climb. It's not even such a bad way to learn.
Option 1 is harder, and is less likely to get quick results. But there are definitely skills you learn much more with Option 1 than with Option 2, like thinking of creative methods. Sometimes the easy tools aren't available, or they break in your hands—e.g. because the available beta is from a significantly smaller climber and their method won't work for you. When that happens, you'll want to have an understanding of which moves to invest in trying harder vs. when to search for different moves. You'll want perseverance to keep trying even when you don't know a method that will work. In short, you'll want to have gotten experience being in that situation—a hard climb that you don't know how to do and have to figure out yourself.
I don't see any dopamine on the sidewalk
In "The Anti-Social Century" (2025), Derek Thompson (co-author of Abundance) writes about how lonely everyone is these days, even though we could hang out with each other if we decided to, and people love to hang out with each other. But my question is, why? Why not go outside?
I think a significant part of it is that you can see talking faces on your fucking phone. That does not feel nearly as good as being with other people, but it does actually hit at the need, at least temporarily and partially. Ditto texting.
And the kicker is that it's so easy. No risk, no coordination, no disappointment. You can do it on your phone, without ever getting out of bed or even opening your computer. It's a higher reward/investment ratio, from a certain perspective.
nvim or emacs? YES
So many people have not heard the good word of nvim. So sad. Yes there's a learning curve, but then AFTER the learning curve, it's so much better for text editing! In a webform textbox I feel halfway handless!
Why do word-making-upping when you can just use existing words?
When you come to the edge of thinking, you reach for words, but there aren't any words already ready for you to grab. You have two options:
- Option 1: Lexicogenesis—think up a new word to use here.
- Option 2: Repurpose, tweak, or agglomerate existing words to fit the local purpose.
Now, Option 2 certainly works better in the obvious senses. It's easier, and then you can get along with saying what you were trying to say, reasonably well, maybe with the cost of saying several syllables too many each time. Why figure out "piano" when you can just say "big box you fight him he cry", which only uses words you already know?
Sometimes repurposing works basically fine. Mathematicians sometimes use common nouns for technical terms, and it's basically fine because it's such a well-signalled context, and they get good leverage out of metaphors ("sheaf", "mapping", "universe", ...). Philosophers, on the other hand, though they ought to be among the most in need of really good new words, seem to often be rather shite at this.
(Excuse me, Herr, this is a Wendy's.)
But unsuitable words make you think mistakenly in the long run.
Conclusion
I'm definitely not saying not to use powerful industrial tools that make pretty good products really cheaply. I love my myriad cheap consumer products, such as my blender, my keyboard, my water bottle, my computer mouse; I love hard, flat, non-sloshy roads.
The point isn't to be inefficient. If I have a point, the point is to remember about the possibilities for better results. More interesting Art, more functional computer programs, more useful words.
If an agent (such as a human) has severe constraints on the mental computing power that they have available, that agent will probably be a cognitive miser. By default, we don't think harder than we have to. Usually, unless we decide to do things the hard way—the way that's harder and takes longer, but also opens up really new possibilities—then we won't do that way, because there will be an easier way that gets pretty good results much more cheaply.
If no one decides to do it the hard way, it will never get done. Philosophers look at scientists, with their seat-of-the-pants epistemology on easy mode, and don't feel motivated to figure out how to maintain sanity the hard way. No amount of asphalt paving machines at any insanely cheap price will produce this pavement:
That's the Ease Disease. It's following the principle of least effort off a cliff, completely forgetting the aura of possibilities that lives around our current behavior patterns. It's bowing to the law of the hammer. You may have to hike back down the mountainside for a while and then take a different fork in the trail, to get higher in the longer hike.