Three Model Organisms For Taste

Astral Codex Ten Three Model Organisms For Taste ... MAY 08, 2026

(a continuation of yesterday’s post)

Reddit Vexillology

Vexilllogy is the c. elegans of aesthetics - the simplest model organism that lets us observe dynamics of interest. I haven’t read enough MFA books to do more than relay the thoughts of my betters, and you probably haven’t either. But anyone can have opinions on flags.

If you’re like me, you learned the following code of good flags:

They should be so simple that a child could draw them.

No images, no “busy” areas, and - for God’s sake - no text

The rule of tincture: “never put metal on metal, or color on color”. In medieval heraldry, “metals” were yellow and white (sometimes implemented with literal gold and silver) and “colors” were every other color (except black, which is a “fur” and has its own rules). A good flag shouldn’t have a metal touch another metal, or a color touch another color. So the French tricolor (blue then white then red) is okay, but a hypothetical (blue then red then white) tricolor wouldn’t be okay, because blue would be touching red, which would be “color on color”.

Every so often, a US state will decide that its flag is politically incorrect and sponsor a contest to design a new one. Then online vexillologists will go over the entries, savaging any that violate the code. “Look how busy this one is! It has four different colors!” “Oh god, this one literally included text! Can you believe it!” They’ll moan and scowl and ask why everyone can’t be more like Indonesia. Good old Indonesia, they know how to follow the rules:

But the non-Indonesians are starting to fighting back. Search the keyword “reddit vexillology” on X to make contact with the Resistance.

There are even memes!

If the vexillological resistance marches under a banner, it must be the flag of medieval Venice (c. 1000 - 1797):

The Reddit Vexillologist arguments are:

Flags were originally intended to distinguish friend from foe on the battlefield. To serve this purpose, they ought to be easily distinguishable from far away, through smoke, dust, etc. There’s no way anyone could read text in these conditions.

Sometimes your militia will need Betsy Ross - a random seamstress without fancy equipment - to sew them a flag out of bedsheets. Your flag should be simple enough that Betsy can do a good job.

Patriotic young children will sometimes want to draw flags, and we should let them. This means no complex shapes that a child would get wrong.

The Rule of Tincture is obviously correct. A color on a color looks like crap! Come on, can’t you see this?

The resistance counterarguments are:

Battlefield recognition is no longer a main use case for flags, so this is no longer relevant. Besides, the medieval flags, which actually did get used in battle, mostly break your rules. You are trying to out-medieval the medievals.

A modern Betsy Ross could order the most complex flag in the world off CafePress for $19.99 with same-day shipping.

Young children aren’t going to object to having to draw a lion with wings. Young children love drawing lions with wings. No child has ever said “I hate lions with wings, I wish my country’s flag was something cool, like a red square on top of a white square.”

The origins of the Rule of Tincture are unclear, but plausibly related to medieval craftsmen using literal metals, and crafting heraldic crests using techniques where it was practically difficult to get metals to join with other metals (or colors to join with other colors) properly. It would be a wild coincidence if the limitations of medieval craftsmanship just so happened to correspond to timeless aesthetic truths. You just think flags which break the rule look like crap because you’ve been so acculturated into the rule that any violation of it feels jarring on a preconscious level.

Many of the most iconic flags in the world, including America, Brazil, California, Spain, the Vatican, Iran, and the United Nations, violate the conventions. A theory of vexillology where all of these are wrong would be like a theory of drama where Shakespeare sucked.

To all of these objections, I would add a broader one: sure, the Reddit vexillologists say that this is all about what’s easy for soldiers and children and Betsy Ross. But flags from back in solders/children/Betsy’s day were more complicated (eg Venice). And in every other form of art, the past two hundred years have seen detail gradually give way to minimalism. Prose has become less flowery, architecture has become less ornamented, dress has become plainer. And now there’s a movement for minimalist flags. Hmmmmmm. Are you sure you’re thinking of poor Betsy, or have you been unknowingly seized and by the zeitgeist and dragged off?

I think this is a successful model organism. We meet all the same considerations of context, history, aesthetics, and pattern languages. But here it’s obvious that many of the “rules of good taste” are obsolete historical artifacts (and pseudo-historical artifacts!) that got trapped because people who are familiar with them think everything else “looks wrong”, and which threaten to homogenize the field into a slurry.

And that’s why I think American greatness depends on adopting X user @Sven_Etienne’s US Flag In The Style Of Venice:

2: Movie Plot Holes

There’s a whole literature on why the eagles couldn’t have flown Frodo to Mordor (or, if your answer is that the Dark Lord would have noticed when they got close, fly him halfway). I’m not touching that one with a ten-foot-pole.

Here’s one that AFAIK nobody defends: when Obi-Wan was charged with hiding baby Luke from Vader, how come - out of an entire galaxy of places to conceal him - he placed him with Vader’s stepbrother, in Vader’s hometown, without even changing his last name?

On the one hand, this is extremely dumb, and makes me think less of George Lucas. On the other, it doesn’t change my enjoyment of Star Wars at all. Hundreds of millions of people have watched and loved Star Wars, and either not noticed this, or loved it despite this flaw.

Is this what people mean by “paying attention”? You might not think of these things on a first or second viewing. But some movies reward careful thought by showing hidden depths, and others punish it when a seemingly coherent story breaks down into nonsense.

You can go further. A nitpicky uber-nerd will spot that Ultra-Man’s laser is described as having a range of 1,000 feet in “Ultra-Man Behind The Scenes”. But in Ultra-Man #88, he was seen flying above the Empire State Building and shooting someone on the ground, even though the building is 1,250 feet tall. Is a comic series that doesn’t make any of these mistakes “better” than one that does? Are people who care about these things better, more tasteful readers than the rest of us?

Maybe. A superhero story that hangs together nicely is a more elegant and impressive artifact than one which constantly contradicts itself. This doesn’t affect whether normal people like the story or not, but we already agreed that taste is in many ways supposed to stand apart from the judgment of normal people (who like slop).

Is this just telling us that we respect taste when the taste-haver is an aristocrat with strong opinions on wine, but don’t respect it when the taste-haver is an uber-nerd with strong opinions on Ultra-Man’s blaster range?

Tech Company Names

I wanted to title one of the articles in this series “Against Taste”. In the end, what stopped me was one of my model cities posts. A project mentioned there is called Infinita. The project is fine, but I can’t get over the name. Sure, infinity is cool. But that’s exactly the problem. It tries too hard for an easy win. What’s cool? Infinity. How do you turn something into a name? “A” at the end. You feel like they’re manipulating you into feeling impressed.

But Infinita’s predecessor Vitalia had a good name. Superficially it’s the same idea: cool concept + A at the end. But it combines a useful description (Vitalia focused on biotech and longevity) with a subtle nod to its inspiration and chief supporter, Vitalik Buterin. Even though the two company names superficially resemble each other, those of us who really understand tech companies realize that the latter is actually quite clever in context.

This is taste. But it doesn’t seem exactly like any of the eight categories at the beginning of yesterday’s post. It’s closest to “novelty and innovation”. “Infinita” doesn’t do anything new or interesting with tech company names; it just takes the absolute easiest lowest-hanging fruit there is. But it’s more than that; “City Project Investors, Inc” is also extremely easy and not new or interesting, but it doesn’t seem as bad. Above, I used the word “manipulating”, and I sort of stand by that. It’s too much of an “easy win” - too good with too little work.

Part of my “Contra Everyone On Taste” crusade is to be against this sort of thing. There are people who think that any poem that rhymes is an “easy win” and therefore tasteless, or any art that looks like anything, or any building with ornament or symmetry. I hate this outlook, but then what do I mean when I admit there’s some sense in which easy wins are bad?

There was an AI generated poetry Turing Test a while ago. People revealed their bad taste by liking some AI poems that I considered absolutely horrid:

Yet in this fleeting dance, we find our grace For time’s own rhythm guides us, slow or fast Each second lived, a treasure we embrace For in its flow, we find our lives amassed

Though time may steal what once was bright and true The sun will rise again - and so shall you

Bits of this are nonsensical - why would you use the word “amassed” there? do we really embrace treasures? - but this isn’t the main problem. If it were only that, it would be no worse than Ultra-Man’s blaster having the wrong range. I think what makes me violently allergic is that this is stringing too many cliches together. “The sun will rise again - and so shall you”? Really?!

Maybe this isn’t actually a cliche, I’ve never heard that particular phrase before, but it’s the sort of thing that could be a cliche. I don’t know how else to describe it! You’re trying to manipulate me by doing easy things that you know will work, and the fact that it slightly does work just makes it even more galling!

More on this topic later.

Subscribe to Astral Codex Ten By Scott Alexander P(A|B) = [P(A)*P(B|A)]/P(B), all the rest is commentary. By subscribing, you agree Substack's Terms of Use, and acknowledge its Information Collection Notice and Privacy Policy. 211 Likes ∙ 5 Restacks Previous 430 Comments Taleuntum 2d

Typo:

Are you sure you’re thinking of poor Betsy, or have you been unknowingly seized and by the zeitgeist and dragged off?

REPLY (1) Max Harms 2d

Also "Vexilllogy"

REPLY (1) Tyrone Slothrop 2d

My autocorrect dictionary doesn’t have it either.

REPLY Ashley Yakeley 2d

The Rule of Tincture applies to coats of arms, not flags, and black ("sable") is a colour, not a fur, even though it's named after one.

REPLY (1) NormalAnomaly 2d

Flag/coat of arms is a false dichotomy, but you're getting at something true and important: it's fine to have a field division that puts color next to color or metal next to metal, just not to stack a charge on top of a field it has bad contrast with. Hence the US flag obeying the rule of tincture: the only place it applies is to the stars, and the stars are white on blue.

REPLY (1) Ashley Yakeley 2d

Flag / coat of arms is actually a true dichotomy. While flags are sometimes made from coats of arms, and vice versa, they are different things with different rules. Most notably, a flag is specified graphically, with specified dimensions, measurements, angles and so forth, and typically Pantone colours as well. A coat of arms, by contrast, is specified by a short stylised text known as the blazon, which may be depicted in a wide variety of ways.

Secondly, the US flag would NOT obey the rule of tincture if it applied (or if you slapped it on a shield). This is because, from a heraldic perspective, the field is red that just happens to have six white stripes on, so when you put the canton on, it's a blue-on-red violation.

It's for this reason that the United States coat of arms "argent six pallets gules, a chief azure" has to swap the stripes so that there are seven white and six red.

REPLY (2) dbmag9 2d

Since you've mentioned it, you might be interested to learn that the UK flag in fact is defined by blazon (as far as it's defined at all), and doesn't really have official Pantone colours and dimensions: https://www.college-of-arms.gov.uk/resources/union-flag-approved-designs

REPLY (1) NormalAnomaly 2d

Classic UK! Gotta love them.

REPLY NormalAnomaly 2d

Perhaps I should instead say that I don't believe in flags by that definition--anything with the same blazon is the same thing to me. Though I'll admit it's nice that modern communication and manufacturing improvements let us display our national arms on such elegantly uniform banners.

Re barry fields and the rule of tincture: neat! I'm used to barry fields being considered neutral without regard to which one is 51% of the field. It all depends on which heraldic authority's jurisdiction you're in: in the part of Europe that's now Germany, red on black was considered perfectly cromulent!

REPLY (1) Ashley Yakeley 2d

By your definition the flags of Indonesia and Monaco are identical, not just similar. Inevitably it's going to depend on jurisdiction: the UK can get away with a blazon for their flag (thank you dbmag9) while the governments of Indonesia and Monaco presumably have to be more specific to avoid the ambiguity, and not just "party per fess gules and argent"

I think generally it was mostly British and French heraldic authorities that were always strict about the RoT? Lots of violations in Eastern Europe and elsewhere e.g. Albania's CoA, and famously the Kingdom of Jerusalem.

REPLY (1) NormalAnomaly 1d

Yeah, there are a lot of historical sets of rules. But one of Indonesia and Monaco should change their flag. Monaco is (vastly) smaller so ideally they'd be the one to change; OTOH someone elsewhere in this thread suggested a cool Indonesia variant.

REPLY (1) Ashley Yakeley 1d

Monaco had theirs first (1881) and actually complained to Indonesia when they adopted theirs in 1945. So no Monaco isn't going to change theirs.

REPLY (1) NormalAnomaly 1d

Alas. Make 'em play rock paper scissors for it </s>

REPLY Abe 2d

Typo: But flags from back in solders/children/Betsy’s day were more complicated (eg Venice).

REPLY Bugmaster 2d

Is a comic series that doesn’t make any of these mistakes “better” than one that does? ... Maybe. A superhero story that hangs together nicely is a more elegant and impressive artifact than one which constantly contradicts itself. This doesn’t affect whether normal people like the story or not...

I believe that it does. Sure, maybe normal people won't catch a single laser-range error, especially if it's only mentioned in an off-hand comment in some obscure source. But if in issue 155 Ultra-Man says "oh no, the villain is all the way across the street, just out of range of my laser !" and in issue 156 he lasers an enemy base on the Moon all the way from the ground level on Earth, people will notice; and if the comic writers keep doing stuff like that, they will lose readership, even among the normies.

People want to know that the creators whose content they're consuming respect their audience enough to put care and attention into their work, and people will notice when this isn't the case even when they lack the highly technical vocabulary to enumerate every specific point of failure. Incidentally, this is also why AI art is so often reviled: AI doesn't care (because it cannot care), and it shows.

REPLY (9) Schneeaffe 2d

Yes, it matters for things which are directly plot-driving. The hyperspace kamikaze was exactly an example of normies noticing.

REPLY (1) Matthew Talamini 2d

Sanderson's First Law is relevant.

REPLY Simone 2d

Yup. There's an argument deployed by Last Jedi & such defenders which goes "it's all made up, why do you care?" - but the obvious answer is that for me to feel like there are any stakes to any story that involves an actual, material conflict (and not just e.g. internal psychological reflection) I need to feel like its world obeys basic causality rules such as "things that are impossible at time X are also impossible at later time Y". Rules may be different, and to some extent vague-ish, but they must have some consistency. This is a loose affair because for example I don't know the precise extents or workings of a Jedi's telekinesis. But I know that I've always seen them move relatively small objects; when Yoda moved an entire X-Wing it was treated as an awesome feat which left Luke dumbstruck. So if you showed me a Jedi effortlessly deflecting an entire moon from a collision trajectory with a planet, I would feel like that's breaking SOME unspoken rule of the universe.

REPLY (5) Kveldred 2d

There's an argument deployed by Last Jedi & such defenders which goes "it's all made up, why do you care?"<

IME, these folks can always be stymied by a 𝘳𝘦𝘥𝘶𝘤𝘵𝘪𝘰—just keep offering more & more ridiculous & blatant contradictions, until they're either admitting that okay, yes, a Jedi swinging a moon around effortlessly and then later struggling to even lift a pomegranate = kind of bad... or (probably dishonestly, but certainly ludicrously) that they wouldn't mind that at all.

Almost everyone cares about verisimilitude in the end, I think—they just have different tolerances for flaws therein (and/or, usually, don't like admitting that something they like anyway could legitimately be flawed, heh).

REPLY (1) Melvin 1d

If two people are watching the same movie, and one of them notices something that breaks verisimilitude, and the other one doesn't, then the resulting conversation is never fun.

One will get annoyed at the other for ignoring the thing that ruined the whole movie, while the other will get annoyed at the first for letting such a dumb nitpick ruin an otherwise good movie for them. Is the second person a mouth-breathing autist who can't understand suspension of disbelief, or is the first person just an idiot who doesn't notice the glaring flaws in the thing they're blithely enjoying?

REPLY Michael Watts 2d Edited

There's an argument deployed by Last Jedi & such defenders which goes "it's all made up, why do you care?"

Huh. I'm more familiar with that as an argument deployed by attackers.

https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2010/04/09/a-matter-of-when

Defenders aren't usually out there claiming that the stuff they like is stupid and no one should care about it.

REPLY (1) Milo P 1d

I also usually see it used by defenders. They're not claiming it's stupid, they're saying "you just gotta turn off your brain and enjoy it!" (which of course is a pretty weak defense).

The currently popular dismissal in the specific context of the Star Wars fandom is "it's not that kind of movie, kid", quoting Mark Hamill quoting Harrison Ford in an interview about filming the first movie. It's a funny story in that context, but the quote gets trotted out as a thought-terminating cliche every time someone tries to talk about continuity or details of the setting.

REPLY Kamateur 2d

This feels exactly to me like the Ultra-man lasers example. I've been accused before, as a TLJ diehard defender, of not taking people in good faith when they say these are the things that bother them most about the movie, but I can't imagine that anyone spends an inordinate amount of time writing out the contradictions in force powers or shield array technologies unless something else is actually the thing that bothers them.

As a more concrete example, George Lucas essentially completely overhauled the rules for how lightsabers work and are used between the original trilogy and the prequels, and people obviously noticed, but no one ever actually complains about it. Most people think the lightsaber fights are genuinely one of the best things about the prequel trilogy, no one complains about how weird it makes the fights in the original trilogy look by comparison. I assume its because its the one part of the story where even critics of the prequels feel like they are getting something they want out of the story, but that thing can't be canonical consistency.

REPLY (3) Mary Catelli 2d

Why not? People tend to complain about what bugs them. I once was party to a discussion of a certain work, and one person complained about the lack of concern about running out of ammo; another that the era would have considered blue jeans to be shockingly immodest; and two more that neither democracy nor religious tolerance were as self-evident as the work pretended, with modern day people able to convert the locals by telling them about them.

It matches the interests pretty well.

REPLY (1) Michael Watts 1d

There was a pretty good essay about this comparing two shows about the Borgias: https://www.exurbe.com/the-borgias-vs-borgia-faith-and-fear/

Envision a scene in which two Renaissance men are hanging out in a bar in Bologna with a prostitute. Watching this scene, I, with my professional knowledge of the place and period, notice that there are implausibly too many candles burning, way more than this pub could afford, plus what they paid for that meal is about what the landlord probably earns in a month, and the prostitute isn’t wearing the mandatory blue veil required for prostitutes by Bologna’s sumptuary laws.

But if I showed it to twenty other historians they would notice other things: that style of candlestick wasn’t possible with Italian metalwork of the day, that fabric pattern was Flemish, that window wouldn’t have had curtains, that dish they’re eating is a period dish but from Genoa, not Bologna, and no Genoese cook would be in Bologna because feud bla bla bla.

So much we know. But a person from the period would notice a thousand other things: that nobody made candles in that exact diameter, or they butchered animals differently so that cut of steak is the wrong shape, or no bar of the era would have been without the indispensable who-knows-what: a hat-cleaning lady, a box of kittens, a special shape of bread. All historical scenes are wrong, as wrong as a scene set now would be which had a classy couple go to a formal steakhouse with paper menus and an all-you-can-eat steak buffet. All the details are right, but the mix is wrong.

REPLY Milo P 1d

I liked TLJ but I could also understand why that plot point would bother someone, even looking at it purely dramatically and ignoring everything outside the films themselves.

The Resistance resolves the immediate threat of the First Order fleet by ramming one of their ships into a massively bigger ship at lightspeed. However, that path of action would have been available to them the entire time. That's only a surprising maneuver if it wouldn't normally be possible, but as we see, it is entirely possible to do. So, within the story, why was no one expecting it, and why had no one done it before? It's a bit like if a lightsaber duel was resolved by one combatant suddenly using the Force to squish the other's brain - if that was on the table, why does anyone ever bother having a lightsaber duel to begin with?

I think you're right though that sometimes people point to the "superhero power consistency" aspect of it when it's really the dramatic side that's bothering them. Going into TROS, the "somehow palpatine returned" thing has been deservedly mocked, but the real problem (imo) isn't that we don't know the exact mechanics of it, it's that we have no idea what the stakes are meant to be. Is Palpatine in his original body? Is he a clone? We never find out in the movie itself, and so when he dies again at the end, it's not clear how we're meant to feel about it.

REPLY (2) Kamateur 1d

I mean, I have often thought that if you can move the lightsaber with your mind, holding it to cut people instead of shooting it at your enemies like a guided missile, Yondu style, doesn't actually make sense. I think lightsaber duels would look pretty cool if it were two dudes sitting cross legged, meditating, while their lightsabers battle each other. At some point at some future date I imagine someone will have that idea and it will make it into a TV show, and when the question comes up "why have we never seen this before" the answer will be quite obviously, "because no writer had thought of it and the technology to show it didn't exist yet." The Holdo Maneuver is exactly the same. Fans bend over backwards to answer questions the material doesn't deal with all the time, their unwillingness to do so with TLJ makes me suspect they just don't feel like doing it for some other reason.

And there, is, btw, an in universe answer in line with the themes of the movie and the broader universe. The First Order, like the Empire before them, is colossally arrogant and short sighted, and their officers are cowards and bullies. They can't conceive of an enemy being skilled enough and self sacrificing enough to pull it off, and they were too distracted shooting down escape pods to focus on the larger threat. Its the exact same logic that leads to building planet killer after planet killer that can relatively easily be destroyed by small independent fighters and bombers: the idea that the bad guys are competent has been subverted in the franchise so many times that the few times they actually do pull off a victory that isn't entirely dependent on larger numbers and heavier weapons its treated as a genuine shock wherever it happens.

REPLY (3) Simone 1d

To be clear, had the hyperspace ramming scene been the ONLY fault of The Last Jedi it'd be vastly more forgivable. I think it's the most glaring continuity WTF but the fundamental problems I have with TLJ have to do with bad script, bad characterisation, general aimlessness and being essentially a spanner thrown intentionally in the works of a trilogy that was maybe doomed from the beginning but had at least a shot at being an organic ok narrative instead of a chaotic hot mess. The jump scene itself would have been much different in impact if it had involved the sacrifice of a character we loved and cared about instead of one that had been hastily introduced to make a rather on-the-nose point and was just as hastily dispatched. And people make (rightfully) fun of "Somehow, Palpatine has returned", but "That's how we're gonna win. Not by fighting what we hate. But saving what we love." in the context in which it's spoken is just as godawful.

REPLY (1) Kamateur 15h

I think they are different. Somehow Palpatine returned means "we were desperate for this franchise to have stakes and the only thing we could come up with was bringing back the big bad of the original trilogy, and even we couldn't figure out how that makes sense."

"We win because we are fighting for love, not hate" or whatever the line is is legitimately the theme of the movie, and an attempt to articulate what makes the good guys good in star wars (or heroic fantasy generally) beyond just "gestures at lightside and darkside." Is it heavy handed to just say it? I think that's a far critique actually. But given how many people didn't realize that every other scene in the film works around this dichotomy and offers different examples of it, or how generally everyone of every type of morality always insists that Star Wars is on their side despite how crazy their moral beliefs actually are, I think there's some value in being explicit. Star Wars, particularly after the Force Awakens, was in a position of treating the good guys as good for purely aesthetic reasons, ie, they dress like the good guys and not the bad guys. And then everybody cheers when the "good" guys blow stuff up. And TLJ asks, "is this is all Star Wars is now, just two sides blowing each other up forever?" and tries to come up with an answer that makes the franchise about more than a juvenile power fantasy. This is at the core of everything going on in the movie, and explains a lot of stuff everyone thought was unexplainable. Luke abandons being a Jedi not because he can't beat the bad guys but because he can't conceive of a victory where beating them doesn't just legitimize violence and unleash a new cycle of war. Rey reminds him that actually, at his best, he wasn't ever fighting to destroy anything, he was fighting to save his friends, to redeem his father. When Darth Vader dies, its an act of love, every meaningful moment in Star Wars is actually an act of love. And I admit, I'm a sap and that resonates with me, but If people understood that as what the movie was saying and then said "actually I think that's sappy" or "I disagree" I would be like "fair enough." But most people's complaints act as if all that stuff isn't even there, when its so obviously there. Its an attempt to answer the question "why do enlightened space monks carry laser swords?" and the answer is "because sometimes you have to be able to distract the bad guys who are coming for your loved ones, and a big glowing stick is a pretty good distraction." I love that.

REPLY (1) Simone 14h

But given how many people didn't realize that every other scene in the film works around this dichotomy and offers different examples of it, or how generally everyone of every type of morality always insists that Star Wars is on their side despite how crazy their moral beliefs actually are

This is IMO basically strawmanning, and this compulsion to argue that TLJ served some necessary moral or political purpose to "teach a lesson" to these media illiterate fans is in fact IMO the main thrust behind defending it - which I consider misguided, because art shouldn't be judged by how much it owns the side we don't like.

First, yes, pretty much everyone realises that's the theme of the movies. But the problem of the Rose and Finn scene is that it has enormous dissonance. Finn wasn't acting motivated by hate, he was acting motivated by love - by wanting to protect the other members of the resistance from the cannon that was about to blow their doors and let the enemy flood in. Being motivated by love in war doesn't mean that you don't also have to destroy stuff, and it doesn't mean that as long as you act with love in mind everything you do will lead to success. Finn was taking a heroic and sacrificial action that made sense, for love - Rose does something impulsive and nonsensical which only works out because everyone has plot armour. Also, from a narrative standpoint, given that no one else apparently had anything more to do with Finn, it would have been more dignified for his arc to at least get a good end there.

Second, the reason why everyone can project on Star Wars is because of course they can. While there are here and there hints at specific political concepts (I think the prequels, especially AotC and RotS, are actually the most genuinely political movies of the saga), in practice SW is for the most part a blank canvas of generic goodness and freedom vs generic badness and tyranny that anyone can project on. The Imperials looking vaguely like Nazis doesn't mean much, Nazi-chic is basically the aesthetic of choice in our post-WW2 cinematic language for any kind of "lawful evil" baddie. Other than that, the Rebels love freedom and are loveable rogues, the Imperials are stuffy authoritarians with a stick up their ass and commit occasionally random acts of planetary genocide (I think it's also kind of silly to say the difference between Resistance and First Order is purely aesthetic - TFA was a terribly uninspired and derivative movie, and Starkiller base made almost as little sense as the hyperspace ramming, but these are the guys who just blew up several planets with billions of people on them, so I think that makes them worse than almost anyone imaginable). Everyone, left or right, likes to think they love freedom and their counterparts want to oppress them, so this is really a template that resonates all around, even as either side thinks that the other guys Just Don't Get It and aren't allowed to like Star Wars because they're the Empire.

REPLY (1) Kamateur 13h

Well, we legitimately disagree with how we read the scene with Finn, which is fine, but I think my way, which is that its an angry pointless suicide run born out of frustration and anger, makes more sense within the construction of the movie, even if its its not perfectly sign marked. Remember, at that point, the Resistance hasn't figured out how to escape the planet yet, so his action doesn't buy them anything, not even time. Its only when Rey shows up that they actually have a shot. This is Holdo's argument, again she's pretty explicit about it. The actions of Finn at the beginning of the movie aren't necessary because they have other ways escape, he just wants to bloody the nose of the bad guys on his way out, and he's willing to spend lives to do it. So "the thing that makes our side the good guys is that we don't spend lives just to feel like we are hurting the other side" is an important moral point as well as a pragmatic one (because they have less lives to spend).

Re: of course everyone thinks Star Wars agrees with them, that's correct, but again, within the film itself, they talk about how difficult it is to build a meaningful resistance if all you have are the aesthetics of resistance. That's the whole point of going to Canto Blight to recruit a hacker only to have him say "sorry, I'm a cynical person and I don't recognize a meaningful difference between the Resistance and the First Order." Its also why when Poe sends out his big distress beacon, no one comes. Poe spends the whole movie assuming that everyone already knows he's on the right side, without doing anything to demonstrate what that looks like beyond saying " fuck the first order" and then he's shocked when in the end no one is inspired. I've been watching this dynamic play out in the real world, so I appreciate that someone called out it in a film a decade ago. You are right that at the end of the day Star Wars might be too broad a canvas to say anything meaningfully artistic or political, but insofar as people keep insisting its a key text of American culture, I appreciate the Last Jedi for trying while every other major Disney entry to the canon did not (except for Andor, which is even more exceptional in its depiction of real praxis).

REPLY (1) Simone 13h

I guess I simply feel that "trying to convey a theme by making your characters say the theme in a very on the nose manner while the actions on screen bafflingly defy it" is probably worse than having no theme at all. This happens again and again - the Canto Blight scene suffers from it, so does the bomber run and all the Holdo/Poe argument. The movie keeps trying to make false equivalences that don't work because the other side has been established as so blatantly, cartoonishly evil already, or tries to paint as unreasonable and reckless actions that are at best only in hindsight non optimal, but that we can very well believe did look like the best course of action at the time. Even the notion of Luke as the jaded veteran who sees no reason to involve himself any more feels absurd in context - that trope is established and exists for a reason, but again, here the First Order is so evil that someone blathering about how there's no point in fighting them since it's all the same anyway doesn't look just weary and cynical, he simply looks like an idiot. If there was some actual ambiguity it'd be a lot more believable.

It's not even like I don't think the themes would potentially have merit. There's a much better recent movie that tackles many of the same ideas, it's Godzilla Minus One. I liked that one a lot. TLJ was a mess and it mostly seems to subsist on people agreeing with it on a purely intellectual level.

REPLY John Schilling 1d

The Holdo Maneuver is exactly the same. Fans bend over backwards to answer questions the material doesn't deal with all the time

It's not "questions the material doesn't deal with", it's questions the material raises, deals with *very badly*, and then ignores. Like "Somehow, Palpatine came back".

And, yes, in a series that has been about Wars out among the Stars for almost fifty years, the tactics and technology of space combat are something the material has to deal with. When you made the movie about space dogfights, you raised the question of how space dogfights work. The audience needs to understand what options are available to the heroes and the villains and what isn't, just like a different audience needs to understand that Snoopy can't just launch a heat-seeking missile at the Red Baron.

REPLY (1) Kamateur 15h

My first thought was "I thought nerds used to agree to hold different properties to different standards, you're talking like this is Star Trek" but then I realized evem Star Trek, a show with much more detailed rules about ship to ship combat, invents new bullshit all the time. Many people hold that Wrath of Khan is the best Star Trek movie, and that is the one where Kirk beats Khan, a genetically engineered super genius, by steering his spaceship "down." A direction no one had apparently ever used before in space warfare. And I don't mind, because they explain it as Khan, for all his genius, being psychologically two dimensional in his thinking. I feel like the same logic works in TLJ, we see the enemies go from "I've got them" to "oh shit I hadn't considered that, I'm fucked" and the reason is again, arrogance, hubris, and short sightedness, something that causes people to lose real world conflicts they should win all the time.

REPLY Doug S. 9h Edited

In KOTOR 2, the final boss wields multiple lightsabers at once via Force telekinesis. I think Yoda should have fought Dooku like that - or at least with an elegant minimalist style and economy of motion rather than jumping all over the place - but at least the jumping looked cool.

REPLY AnthonyCV 9h

I haven't actually seen a star wars movie since the prequel trilogy (not for any real reason), but those of us from Ye Olde Fandom remember that there was once an Extended Universe story in which Palpatine did, in fact, return as a clone. And anyone who bothered to watch the prequel trilogy knows he intimated to Anakin that, in fact, the Sith knew how to stop people from dying, and suggested he could teach Anakin this power. The laziness of just...not caring about the universe's own rules and past stories makes it much less defensible, when almost all the work of coming up with a justification had already been done.

REPLY Simone 1d

I mean, it is like that example? I don't see the contradiction here. The point is that feeling that you're looking at a world that lacks basic cause-and-effect consistency breaks immersion. How attuned you are to noticing these things on the fly will depend on personal circumstances - for someone trained in science and engineering it tends to be easier because that's part of our job, noticing when something is off and spotting the issue is a professional skill and you can't just easily turn it off. But either way everyone has a breaking point, for some it'll just be harder to hit. And no story of this sort loses anything by just putting in a bit more effort into it. Every time breaking the rules allows you a grand set piece you can almost surely come up with an equivalently cool set piece that doesn't, it's not a binary choice.

REPLY Mary Catelli 2d

Why do you care? is not an argument, it's a deflection, at best.

The immortal meme is of the last T. rex fighting for its country in WWI -- and all the complaints that obviously it's WWII. The Jeep would be evidence enough but they point out more.

REPLY (1) Doug S. 9h

Some things are load-bearing premises that one suspends disbelief for. Others are just mistakes.

REPLY StrangePolyhedrons 19h

when Yoda moved an entire X-Wing it was treated as an awesome feat which left Luke dumbstruck

But Luke had no idea what is or isn't possible, so one could easily take this as "Yoda is showing Luke what a Jedi can really do" rather than "Yoda is showing a unique display of power that only he could do". In fact, Yoda presents it as something Luke should have been able to do for himself and failed only because Luke didn't believe it was possible.

REPLY (1) Simone 14h

That's true, so we don't have a strong constraint, but still, it's clear that it's something that takes effort and mastery - a master can do it and a novice thinks it's impossible - so it can't be trivial. And if moving an X-Wing isn't trivial, surely moving a moon would be several orders of magnitude harder.

And then there's all the duels we've seen and we see later. Being able to move mass on that scale would be significantly useful. You could for example simply crash the Death Star into Endor (with some disregard for the welfare of Ewoks), or drive Imperial Star Destroyers into each other. But this never happens. And as time passes and the world building becomes more consolidated this transforms into a silent but reasonable assumption of "it just isn't possible". If that assumption was suddenly broken several movies in, viewers would feel like at this point anything can happen and any bullshit can be pulled at any moment.

REPLY thepast 2d Edited

Somewhere on Facebook, Yudkowsky has an essay which puts forward the idea that a work of genre fiction must force the reader to swallow only one enormity — time travel, cloning, magic, whatever — but must hang together tightly otherwise. The temptation to treat the reader as an idiot who has already accepted e.g. magic and therefore won’t notice three dozen plot holes is very strong, and most writers are weak.

This is why Worm is better science fiction than anything put on paper in the last 30 years. It solves that classic problem, on which all other superhero fiction has stumbled, leaving the reader to believe the plot while remaining aware that he is reading fiction.

REPLY (5) Nancy Lebovitz 2d

I don't know that there has to be only one enormity. Having a bunch, maybe up to half a dozen, adds to the fun, but there's got to be some limits on what can happen or you've just got a dream sequence.

One constraint is that the enormities have to be towards the beginning of the story.

I'm fond of Drake's _Birds of Prey_. There's a plesiosaur swimming in the Tiber in ancient Rome. The one honest man in a corrupt city must deal with an alien menace, helped by a time traveler from the far future. (The plesiosaur was a side effect of the time travel.)

REPLY (5) Mary Catelli 2d

It depends on how well you make them harmonize. If it looks like you rolled them up on a table, it's unlikely to work.

REPLY Jeffrey Soreff 2d

I don't know that there has to be only one enormity. Having a bunch, maybe up to half a dozen, adds to the fun, but there's got to be some limits on what can happen or you've just got a dream sequence.

Basically agreed.

I have one criticism of complaints about one class of plot holes:

Plot holes of the form: "Given [X], no one would ever be stupid enough to [Y]" has to contend with the fact that the real world has almost unbounded examples of people and organizations making stupid mistakes.

REPLY (1) Simone 14h

Yeah, it's one thing if it's about one specific character that we know to be very smart, but in general, if something merely requires someone to be very stupid, it's never impossible.

REPLY (1) Jeffrey Soreff 14h

Many Thanks!

REPLY Simone 1d Edited

This really is down to how one draws the boundaries between "things" in a setting which is obviously vague. Star Wars has the Force and the spaceships/hyperspace, which are two seemingly unrelated enormities, though the space stuff is more rooted in theories about reality (however speculative) rather than being wholesale magic.

Personally I think a more accurate view is that the work of fiction establishes its own terms early on, and then has to abide by them. While we're still clearly in the introduction we're more open to accepting new surprising things. After a while in the world though we expect the rules to stay consistent; if new ad hoc stuff was constantly introduced it'd feel like a cheat.

REPLY John Schilling 21h

I generally agree, but one of the advantages of having Science Fiction as an established genre is that you can bundle a package of wonders and expect the target audience to understand and accept it on the basis of past experience. E.g, setting up "We've got the standard list of space-opera wonders, minus deflector shields and psionics but with these two new things that we'll explain as well".

David Brin does this masterfully in the original "Uplift" trilogy, where it's almost a standing gag that the peoples of the Five Galaxies have been making wonders for a *long* time. FTL travel? They've got (let me check my notes) eight different ways of doing that, including a hyperdrive that takes you through memetic space.

REPLY (1) bell_of_a_tower 11h

Yeah. That's the value of genre conventions--once a convention is established, you no longer pay out of your "weird things" budget to follow it.

In fantasy, making a Tolkien elf (tall-ish, graceful, long lived, beautiful, magical) is the no-cost option. In Romantasy, doing an implausible matchup (why is that 900 year old vampire lord falling for that 17 year old? Where did she learn to do <various things>?) is a no-cost option. FTL travel is often a very-low-cost option in science fiction (unless you are explicitly going for the hard side), and everyone is willing to ignore the causality violations inherent in it.

REPLY David Joshua Sartor 7h

Generally you can imagine a latent silly thing behind all the seemingly-unrelated silly things. It's bad when obviously "this is literally fiction" is the only latent variable.

REPLY Ghatanathoah 2d

I would say it depends a lot on what you mean by "work." For instance, "Star Trek" as a whole is full of enormities, but they are generally introduced once per episode, so it works. Most superhero comics are able to create vast universe of enormities by gradually introducing one per comic (Spider-Man gets his powers in one issue, the Lizard in another). I think a more precise rule is that a work of fiction must make readers swallow enormities at a reasonable speed. If you already made them swallow one, save the next one until the sequel or something like that.

REPLY (3) thepast 2d

Yudkowsky was writing, of course, in the context of HPMoR. His narrower point was that a writer of fanfiction is not responsible for the enormities of his source material, which allows him artistic freedom when interacting with the “rules.” That is, the fanfiction author is not placed in the awkward deus ex machina position of being both arbiter and subverter of rules (like an author is). It’s an elegant thought.

The logic extends to true authors, though: make one “large” rule early in the process, then stick to it, and it will be harder not to create a coherent and reasonable story.

I am not sure to what degree this applies to other media, as you say. But probably more than you’d think?

REPLY Melvin 1d

One enormity that doesn't really work well in Star Trek is time travel.

Apparently they time travel in two episodes of the original series which I haven't seen, and then they do it again in Star Trek IV which I have seen, and it's established that apparently time travel is a perfectly easy thing that you can do with any starship, and you'd think that this would be a universe-breaking huge deal but apparently they just generally don't bother, until the plot says that they have to.

REPLY (2) Ghatanathoah 1d

They try to address that a little in the second season of "Picard" by mentioning that the manuever to go back in time are very difficult to pull off and only very smart people with specific training like Spock and the Borg Queen can do it. In the show this primarily serves to explain why Picard has to temporarily ally with a Borg Queen in order to undo some major changes to history.

"Voyager" and "Enterprise" also address it in a few episodes where they introduce Time Police.

REPLY (1) John Schilling 9h

But it seems like Spock can do it pretty reliably, in which case the logical place for Spock to be isn't serving as the science officer of a heavy cruiser or the captain of a training ship, He should be chief pilot for the Federation Temporal Strike Force. Whoever is giving us problems, we planted gigaton-yield antimatter mines under all the military and industrial facilities on their homeworld a million years before they evolved, set to go off (let me check my notes) five seconds from now.

REPLY Doug S. 9h

In general, time travel is against Federation law because they don't want to risk messing up their own present. But that's not that big a justification. "Every time a starship time traveled it either didn't change the past meaningfully or we never saw it come back (because changing the past makes a new timeline without changing the old ones)" would be a better one.

REPLY Caba 1d Edited

Or you can simply say:

"in this universe magic exists"

or "in this universe superpowers exist"

or "in this universe monsters exist"

or "this is the future, so they have crazy technology"

or even just "this is another world where our rules don't apply"

Lots of movies drop you unapologetically in a world of absurdities on top of absurdities, without having to be a sequel of anything, and without many people complaining about it. For example, the recent Dungeons and Dragons movie. The Scott Pilgrim movie. Every adaptation of Alice in Wonderland. Many a Miyazaki movie. Even the first Harry Potter.

In fact, even the latest Superman movie. In which, for example, at one point we see a completely random "interdimensional imp" fighting in the background against minor superheroes (whose origins are not explained either) while Superman has an intimate dialogue with Lois. Lex Luthor randomly has teleportation technology. Superman randomly has a flying superdog. I'm just scratching the surface. Nobody has a problem with any of that.

REPLY (3) Ghatanathoah 1d

Some of those examples, even if they aren't technically sequels, are building on a preexisting foundation of fantastic literature. Superhero crossover universes, fantasy RPG worlds, and shonen fighting anime are established genres that audiences are familiar with (the D&D movie does take place in the same universe as a lot of D&D novels and games). I doubt the Superman movie would have been as successful if movie studios hadn't spent the last decade getting audiences used to superhero crossover universes.

REPLY (1) Caba 17h Edited

The Incredibles came out in 2004, before the superhero movie craze. In addition to the central family of heroes, each of whom had a different power with no explanation for its origins, that movie featured a whole world of superheroes casually alluded to, as well as a variety of futuristic technologies. My mother, born in 1953, had no problem enjoying that movie, and surely would have enjoyed it just as much had it been released in her youth.

I agree that in part this can be explained by prior exposure to superheroes (my mom knows who Superman is), but that means you can write superheroes in the same way as you would write a robber with a gun. A medieval person without prior exposure to guns would find unexplained guns confusing, but everyone today has seen a gun.

Alice in Wonderland was published in 1865, Pinocchio in 1883. Those works quickly stack absurdity on top of absurdity. If they rely on established tropes too, how far back do those tropes go? I think it's less that they rely on established tropes and more that, as I've just said to Simone, not everything needs realism.

REPLY (1) AnthonyCV 8h

Alice in Wonderland is an absurd story, but feels at least somewhat coherent because it is somewhat coherent, just completely sideways.

The weird rules in each scene are Lewis Carroll's illustration of the abstract mathematics of his day, and are quite consistent. You can tell that there's something there, underpinning it all, even if you can't figure out what.

Jabberwocky is a nonsense poem made of perfectly cromulent and grammatical *English* nonsense words and phrases, showing that Chomsky's "Colorless green ideas sleep furiously" didn't go nearly far enough in demonstrating how the way our minds process words can make nonsense feel meaningful.

REPLY Simone 14h

Different genres and ambitions have different rules. Scott Pilgrim for example is explicitly meant as an extremely meta nerd culture based allegorical story about the role insecurity and maturity play in romantic relationships. It's very clearly SO abstract that there is no notion of realism - the main conflict is not "will Scott be able to beat up this Evil Ex", it's "will Scott be able to stop being such a wussy prick and grow up". The beating up Evil Exes is merely the metaphorical representation of his inner character arc. The same can not be said of all movies featuring violent conflicts, though all such conflicts usually DO also serve some thematic or character development purpose.

REPLY (1) Caba 14h Edited

That's part of my point, not everything needs realism.

REPLY (1) Simone 1h

Absolutely - but fantasy/sci-fi stories need a certain KIND of realism usually, which is to say, self-consistency. Star Wars isn’t a fanciful allegorical story and it never tried to be; it’s trying to create a fictional world that nevertheless feels grounded and lived in. And its stakes hang on a conflict (I mean, it’s in the title…) where the way war works matter a lot. It’s military fiction, albeit rather loose - it’s Guns of Navarone in Space. That’s the identity the main property has built for itself, and so to completely change how tactics or technologies work significantly undermines its ability to create stakes consistent with that identity going forward.

Again, this isn’t a hard set, easily defined thing. There are always exceptions; in art, generally speaking, if the result is good enough you can get away with almost anything. But TLJ was at least very divisive because it wasn’t “good enough” to capture its whole audience - in fact it failed to capture the most the long term audience, who was more invested in that general atmosphere. If you’re going to make something completely different anyway, why even make it under the brand “Star Wars” other than to milk it for money so you can both have your cake and eat it? Had TLJ been a deconstructionist I Can’t Believe It’s Not Star Wars movie on its own (think a bit Watchmen to the DC Comics universe) it could have been a lot better and a lot less hypocritical.

REPLY AnthonyCV 8h

OTOH The Wizard of Oz is so incoherent on this front that the original is basically unreadable. It's almost not even a story. It's just random things happening one after another. And the sequels are worse.

REPLY JohanL 2d

I don't think *one* enormity is the exact problem. Rather, you need to ground the fantastic in the reasonable or realistic. ASoIAF goes "alright, so there's undead and dragons", but then treats it as part of an otherwise mostly naturalistic world.

REPLY Linch 1d

Doesn't HPMOR itself have at least two enormities, both magic itself and Harry's genius?

REPLY (3) The original Mr. X 13h

I'd add a third -- teachers and students accepting Harry being so insufferable about his genius and not putting him in detention/flushing his head down a toilet in about the second chapter.

REPLY (3) Linch 13h

Every nerd's fantasy!

REPLY Doug S. 9h

Snape tried. Harry almost got him fired. 😆

REPLY David Joshua Sartor 7h

Yudkowsky's said that, basically, this one was a mistake on his part due to not knowing enough psychology.

REPLY (1) John Schilling 7h

Nobody tried to flush the Yud's head down the toilet in middle school? Inconceivable!

REPLY AnthonyCV 8h

Harry's genius in HPMOR is within the bounds of what at least some actual humans can do, modulo the kind of luck most stories invoke at least a few times.

REPLY (1) Linch 8h

So one objection is that I don't think this is really true at *eleven*. But setting that aside, I have a bigger objection:

In real-world logic there's a deep and important sense in which a 1-in-a-billion genius is statistically almost infinitely more likely than the existence of Rowling's magical world. But in story logic/relative to the cinematic universe and understanding most normal readers will treat books, I don't think this is quite right. I think both ("magic is real in this world" and "if only Harry was raised by a Scientist he'd be a super-uber genius")are kinda equally improbable in terms of intuitive suspension of disbelief.

REPLY (1) AnthonyCV 5m

Ok, yes, if we're asking the likelihood that this one particular pre-identified individual is such a genius, that is a much bigger leap than such a genius existing at all.

REPLY David Joshua Sartor 7h

Yudkowsky's point in that essay was that it's easier when you're building on a larger canon. His audience had already swallowed whatever from JK Rowling.

Anyway, Harry's genius is explained in-story by magic.

REPLY (1) Linch 7h

That's elegant!

One thing that I really appreciated about Attack on Titan is how almost every seeming incongruity in the beginning of the show is eventually explained as stemming from a single incongruity - the Titans.

There's only one exception that actively annoyed me: the ODM gear that let people fly. I assume it was there because of Rule of Cool.

REPLY bell_of_a_tower 11h

I don't think the number is one, but each reader and each genre does have a limited budget for what I'm thinking of as "weird". Anytime you move away from genre conventions, give something normal a strange name, play fast and loose with verisimilitude, do a plot twist (or don't do the expected plot twist and play it straight where the convention is to subvert), etc, you're spending that budget. And that's totally normal. You *should* spend your budget, but wisely.

Not spending your weirdness budget means you're painting by the numbers. Which *can* be done well (cf David Eddings being challenged to make the most trope-heavy high fantasy adventure he could and making the Beloriad, which was pretty darn good IMO), but often comes across as derivative.

Overspending your budget just makes it weird. Spending your budget *badly*, by for instance calling your (otherwise normal and not-important-to-the-story) cows *glebel-snarps* to be original, makes your story *bad*. Raising the chance of people pulling a DNF (did not finish).

REPLY Voyager 2d

Yeah. Meaningful conflict in a story requires reliable mechanics. For a problem/threat and its resolution to feel meaningful, there needs to be a consistent understanding of what tools are (and, more importantly, aren't) available for solving it. If the hero wins using an ability he hasn't been hinted at to have, or worse, has been shown to not have, that's arbitrary, and if the hero fails to use an ability he's been previously shown to have without explanation, that's fake conflict. If there are no rules to the game, the stakes won't feel real, it becomes obvious that the outcome is pure author fiat instead of something with internal logic.

An important facet of enjoying stories for some people is analyzing the internals. If they see the moon base, they will wonder "how can/will Ultraman deal with that". And they're gonna think of the laser and remember "it only has a range of 1000 feet, he can't use it". And if he then does use it anyway, that will feel like cheating. Because the author changed the rules without telling the readers. And the next time there's a new threat, there's no tension. Because maybe Ultraman will pull something else out of his ass to deal with it. Who can know what else the laser will be able to do once it becomes convenient?

But if the rules are consistent, you can understand why the threat is serious. And you can try to work out the solution, and you get it, you get to feel smart, and if you don't, you get to feel awed by the hero's cleverness.

Of course, different types of stories will have different strictness. Fantasy and Science Fiction have that problem more often, because by their nature they make new rules, whereas other stories can mostly fall back to the already established rules of reality.

And not all readers will care the same. But every hole in your worldbuilding will turn away some marginal audience members who say "that doesn't make sense". And every time you violate expectations without payoff, some audience member will feel cheated. And "Ultraman's laser will continue work like established" is an expectation of those who paid attention when it was described.

See also: Sanderson's Laws of Magic. https://www.brandonsanderson.com/blogs/blog/sandersons-first-law

REPLY (4) Marcus Seldon 2d Edited

"Of course, different types of stories will have different strictness."

This is important to highlight. Not every speculative fiction story needs tight, Brandon Sanderson-style rules and world building. There are some great fantasy series that don't do this (Earthsea comes to mind). But you have to write it with that in mind. You can't set a strict rule, like "Ultraman's laser only has a 1000 ft range", if that's the kind of story you want to write, you need to write in ways that convey more vagueness/ambiguity/mysteriousness about his powers. And even then, you'll still have fuzzy/vague notions of what is and isn't possible.

REPLY (2) Bugmaster 2d Edited

IMO Brandon Sanderson overcompensates in the opposite direction. All his books read like the reference sections of RPG manuals to me. I understand perfectly well how I could build a character using whatever magic system he's describing in his latest book, but lost in all those technical minutiae is the reason why I *should*.

REPLY (5) Hedonic Escalator 2d

As a huge fan of "hard" magic systems, I hate how it's been conflated with this bullshit. I don't want magic to read like RPG mechanics, I want it to read like science in an alternate universe.

Scientific fields are not neat and clean. They overlap in complicated and messy ways, they use paradigms built on centuries if not millennia of trial-and-error, their teachings strive towards accuracy, but are inextricable from culture and are often tied to the legacy of older beliefs. There does not exist 10 rules to govern all of biology, one of 7 clearly defined disciplines. There exists a body of knowledge which seeks to describe an infinitely complex reality. This is what I want from magic systems.

REPLY (2) Bugmaster 2d

I completely agree. Can you recommend some good books that feature such magic systems ? I am running out of reading material, and Kindle's recommendation algorithm keeps backstabbing me...

REPLY (2) Hedonic Escalator 2d Edited

I've been so busy I really haven't had the chance to read as much fantasy as I should. But I quite liked Name of the Wind for this reason. Both the sympathy and rune-based magic systems struck me as being complex in a believable way and integrated into "real" scientific disciplines, such as chemistry. There are some other magic systems at play in the setting that are traditionally "soft" and more mystical, but no RPG bullshit. I find it to be a good combination.

Edit: Maybe you will like the short story I just wrote ;)

REPLY (1) Bugmaster 2d

Doh, I already read Name of the Wind (and it was quite good). I haven't read your short story though -- what is it ?

REPLY Darzin 7h

Wheel of Time has a magic system almost word for word what he's describing especially culturally bound knowledge and limitations of the same. It's really well done in that it feels real in that there are rules but also imperfect knowledge and when the heroes make some innovations it feels natural and we also see their thought process for making these innovations.

REPLY David Joshua Sartor 7h

D&D seems very messy to me. Loads of exceptions to everything.

REPLY JohanL 2d

I read Mistborn, and went "this would be a good computer game, much better than a series of novels."

REPLY DamienLSS 2d Edited

+1. Sanderson seems like a good guy and obviously he's got talent, but to my taste (heh) his is the D&D / MTG / powergamer model of worldbuilding, trying too hard to rules-lawyer a clever loophole that leads to some kind of infinite win condition.

EDIT: This made it ironic that he was tapped to finish Wheel of Time after Robert Jordan's death. Jordan was notorious for the opposite issue - changing or even contradicting his own rules mid-stream, and incorporating plot armor or coincidences so blatant and crude that he even developed an in-universe term for it ("ta'veren").

REPLY Gres 1d

Interesting - I also thought the series spent too long explaining things, and I gave up halfway through the third book. But I thought the problem was the agonisingly repetitive conversations, thoughts and feelings the characters had about the same situation, over and over. I quite enjoyed the rich development of the magic system, I got a fun sense of discovery and I thought the fights etc were satisfying.

REPLY Voyager 1d

That's a good description of what bugged me about Sanderson. Sure, his magic rules are consistent, but they don't feel natural. Allomancy is a list of spells that don't really seem to have much to do with each other. The rules of magic should be like the laws of physics, underlying reality at a deep level, deceptively simple to state but with non-obvious implications.

A spell isn't a rule of magic. A spell is technology that can be in theory developed from analyzing the rules of magic.

REPLY yrrosimyarin 2d

The more general form of Sanderson's law is that consistency is required for *anything the protagonists use to solve the plot.* This could be something as simple and real as "a horse can't swim across the Atlantic" or as complex as Sanderson's magic systems.

The classic "soft" magic systems like Tolkien even follow this. We have no idea what all the Ring's powers are or how it does them, but we know that it:

1) Makes you turn invisible

2) Makes you live longer in an unhealthy/wraith-ish way

3) Turns your will toward desiring it and through it power.

It does this *consistently* throughout the books. Frodo and Sam both take advantage of the invisibility part. The climax of the book depends on Frodo falling to #3.

We don't need a whole Sanderson-esque rule system for the mechanics by which it does any of these things. We just need it to not violate those basic, and we have tension or cleverness, depending, every time our characters use or interact with it.

REPLY (1) Kenneth Almquist 1d

Right. We don’t learn what powers the ring would grant to Saruman or Sauron, but all we need to know is that it would somehow allow them to dominate Middle Earth. The key is to be consistent, not to provide the reader with lots of details that aren’t essential to the story.

I’m reminded of the following article about the moral economy of the Shire:

https://nathangoldwag.wordpress.com/2024/05/31/the-moral-economy-of-the-shire/

Tolkien didn’t write an essay on the structure of hobbit society, but he did have a clear enough understanding in his own head that you can read the LotR multiple times without noticing inconsistencies.

REPLY Jiro 2d Edited

The issue here is that people's mental model of "what can this superhero do" won't usually contain an exact number--it'll be something more general like "it's a struggle to do do a building" or "he can definitely do a building" or "he can send it to the moon".

So Scott is correct that 1250 feet to 1000 feet usually doesn't matter, yet there can still be discrepancies of this type that *do* matter, and not just to Internet nitpickers.

REPLY (2) Erica Rall 2d

Similarly, Star Trek is notoriously vague and contradictory about how fast the ships can go, but gets away from it because within a particular episode or story arc, they're usually pretty clear and consistent when it matters about whether or not "calling for help" or "going to the nearest starbase" or similar is practical in the timeframe of the current situation.

REPLY Voyager 2d

There's definitely a range of importance to nitpicking, but the solution is simple: If you don't want to commit to a number, don't give a number. If the audience needs to know, it's plot-relevant and you need to stick to it. If it doesn't, there no need to make up a number.

Scott's example is fine, and I say that as a nitpicking nerd who loves to take such numbers and do the math, because 1000 feet can easily be understood as a rounded estimate. But Bugmaster's isn't.

REPLY (1) Mary Catelli 2d

I too thought "approximation" for the feet.

REPLY Robert G. 2d

It's important to remember that even the mundane details non involving laser range or magic systems matter. One reason the last few seasons of Game of Thrones were disappointing is that the writers began ignoring basic things like geography. The stakes of the Night's Watch plotline relied on them being isolated and far from the centers of power. In the first season, characters struggled to make the journey safely. The opening scene of the entire series sets up the tension that things that happen to the Night's Watch are ignored by the more central regions. But in later seasons, those distances became meaningless. Characters could travel from the Night's Watch base to the Capital between scenes, despite that distance being about the same as traveling from Chicago to Mexico City.

The importance of geography to the story was so important that they updated the title sequence of each episode to show where characters were in relation to each other. Completely ignoring those spatial relationships destroyed suspension of disbelief more thoroughly than an inconsistent magic system or other more fantastical world building.

REPLY Mary Catelli 2d

He can only not win with an unrevealed power at the climax. Before then, you are revealing it. And also complicating his life if the work's any good.

REPLY (1) Voyager 1d

It's specifically when the outcome of the fight is part of the narrative tension. If the fight clearly is supposed to show off what he can do, of course you can reveal new powers.

Or if story isn't about fighting to begin with. Maybe it's about what the right thing to do is, or revealing a mystery, and the fight just is a spectacle.

REPLY Legionaire 2d

I don't care if the creator "respects" me. They don't know me. The reason a contradiction sucks is that it reminds me I am reading a story. It harms immersion.

"AI slop" usually breaks immersion via continuity errors, or the guiding human author not having any taste of their own, not because "it cannot care".

REPLY (1) Bugmaster 2d

Right, in this case "respect" entails something like, "correctly estimate the intelligence of the average audience member, and put enough effort into the work to ensure that any remaining mistakes are too subtle for that average audience member to catch".

This is also why people complain about CGI in movies: it's not that CGI is inherently bad, it's that producers started slapping it on for cheap with no consideration for quality. Good CGI takes time to create, and once it's done, it's usually *invisible*.

REPLY DangerouslyUnstable 2d

I think this is why I got bored with the Amazon Prime adaptation of Invincible (I have never read the source comic so I don't know if they created the issues or just carried them forward). But I noticed pretty early on that strength/speed/ability levels varied _wildly_ as the plot required. I'm talking multiple order of magnitude between what a character could do in one episode to the next. Abilities were demonstrated that would have trivially solved problems from just a few episodes earlier or later.

It made it all seem kind of pointless. I realize it's not exactly a serious show or whatever, but still, it's annoying, and, in my opinion, shows a lack of thought and creativity. The creators couldn't figure out a way to make real stakes, within the context of the show, so they just changed things to make whateever it was a real issue.

REPLY (2) Kamateur 2d

I can confirm the comic is better about this, mostly as an effect of having more runway to do the power scaling in a comic. It does a much better job of explaining that Mark's powers get better as he exerts them, and to iron out how long it takes him to close the gap between himself and pure-blooded Viltrumites.

REPLY Mary Catelli 2d

*giggle*

I am reminded of how I first stumbled on Scott. The article about how horribly the History Channel bungles its plots. One was that after they pulled the atom bomb out of a hat to wrap up WWII, no one ever thought of using it again to wrap up anything else.

REPLY Brenton Baker 2d

This is why I took issue with the Tolkein example. First, it's clearly explained in the story that the eagles won't fly over the lands of Men because they fear being shot with arrows.

Second, Tolkein's writing is so much better than that of his imitators and detractors (GRR Martin being both) because his stories take place in a logically consistent world. He doesn't sit there and bludgeon the reader with the details of how fast each army marches, or give a numerical breakdown of each division's men and equipment, or spend ten pages writing out the genealogy of every new character, but he clearly DID do the numbers--anybody so inclined can look up the distances covered, put together timelines by the few details provided in the text, and confirm that armies move at army speed and operations happen within reasonable timeframes.

Contrast this with the stupid teleporting armies and nonsensical logistics of ASOIAF--as though the prose weren't bad enough--and the conclusion is that it's important both to have these things worked out to a good degree and also to have them largely exist behind-the-scenes.

REPLY (3) Bugmaster 2d

...or spend ten pages writing out the genealogy of every new character...

I love Tolkien, but to be fair, he kind of does do that. A lot.

http://lotrproject.com/

REPLY (1) Brenton Baker 2d

You're linking to a fan project put together using data from indices and other non-story works. I'm talking about the actual text of The Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings trilogy.

At no point reading any of the stories do I find myself skipping pages; every time Martin introduced a new character, I knew I'd be in for many tedious paragraphs filled with details totally irrelevant to the story. It's a common geek problem: people worldbuild, and then they want to share the worlds they've built, not realizing that the way to share a world is to write an interesting story which takes place in it.

REPLY (1) Bugmaster 2d

That's fair; I was thinking of Tolkien's entire body of work, not just his two most prominent books -- which might be a bit unfair of me. But overall Tolkien was very much into genealogy and especially linguistics.

REPLY (1) Brenton Baker 2d

Are we considering Fellowship, Towers, and Return all one book now? That's news to me. And yes, he was very much into those topics, which is why his world makes internal sense and can have rich, consistent details--it’s just equally important that he has the good sense not to shove the reader's face into his notebook.

REPLY (3) Bugmaster 2d

Yes, ok, I should've said something like "works" instead of "books". And you should read the Silmarillion some time... in fact, this is one of those rare cases when I'd advise listening to it on audiobook instead. The voice actor who reads it puts a lot of life into what would normally be a fairly dry text. His rendition of Fëanor's speech literally gave me the chills.

REPLY Michael Watts 2d Edited

Are we considering Fellowship, Towers, and Return all one book now? That's news to me.

Of course we are. The only reason you'd have more than one volume is that a single combined volume is physically awkward.

But for example, Return of the King is the only volume to include the appendix. That's because the appendix applies to the work as a whole, and there's no reason to print it three times even if you want to print the work in three volumes.

Considering The Lord of the Rings to be three 𝘥𝘪𝘧𝘧𝘦𝘳𝘦𝘯𝘵 books is just as incoherent as considering The Old Curiosity Shop to be 73 "different" books.

REPLY The original Mr. X 13h

Are we considering Fellowship, Towers, and Return all one book now? That's news to me.

TBF that was what Tolkien originally wanted; it was the publisher who insisted on splitting it into three.

REPLY Voyager 2d

Yeah, it's really obvious that Tolkien cared about the consistency of his world. Short scenes justifying certains things like characters not using a seemingly easy solution are everywhere.

What stuck out most to me was that in the Hobbit, it's mentioned that the Men and Elves use the river to ship supplies, and Dain's Dwarves carry extra food.

It's a children's book, and yet thought is spared for something as technical as logistics. An author swho does that will also have put thought into everything else.

However, I don't remember many teleporting armies or nonsensical logistics from ASOIAF, unlike the show, the books, even though they rarely get specific, do keep logistics in mind.

REPLY (2) Brenton Baker 2d

The army speed thing may be me conflating the books and show (the LotR movies have the same problem in places). Pretty sure the Dothraki eat horse meat in the books, though, which is just not how any of this works. I guess you could say Martin’s logistics are awful, but at least he doesn't do much of them.

REPLY (1) John Schilling 21h

For more than you ever wanted to know, entertainingly written, about how ASoIaF/ GoT gets the Dothraki wrong: https://acoup.blog/2020/12/04/collections-that-dothraki-horde-part-i-barbarian-couture/

Devereaux also explains how awful Martin's logistics are: https://acoup.blog/2019/10/04/collections-the-preposterous-logistics-of-the-loot-train-battle-game-of-thrones-s7e4/

REPLY (1) Michael Watts 18h

Devereaux also explains how awful Martin's logistics are

That post says "S7E4" - what does Martin have to do with it?

REPLY (1) John Schilling 15h

Fair point. Devereaux does generally address both the books and the show (likewise his treatment of LotR etc), pointing out the differences where relevant. And a lot of the dubious logistics of GoT are solidly rooted in ASoIaF. But for a seventh-season episode, we can at least hope that Martin wasn't planning to use that *particular* bit of idiocy.

REPLY Michael Watts 2d

It's a children's book, and yet thought is spared for something as technical as logistics. An author who does that will also have put thought into everything else.

Definitely not. When the logistics work in a story, it tells you that the author is interested in logistics.

But it won't tell you that the author is competent in all fields known to mankind. If you read Katharine Kerr's Deverry novels - and if you have some background knowledge in philology yourself - you'll recognize that she is trained in linguistics. But why would you conclude that her description of a nomadic society is likely to make sense?

REPLY (1) Voyager 1d

If logistics are *focused* it tells you the author is interested in logistics. If the logistics are mentioned in passing, it tells you the author is interested in making their world make sense.

The point is not whether any given attempt to do so works out as judged by an expert.

REPLY (1) Michael Watts 18h

Logistics are mentioned in passing (or given more attention than that) in literally everything. This is the kind of standard that would advocate for a world in which there's a background assumption that people belong to families. It tells you nothing.

But on top of that...

An author [who] does that will also have put thought into everything else.

What value do you see in "putting thought" into "everything" subject to the stipulation that those thoughts are worthless?

REPLY (1) Voyager 14h

Not really, and also not always in the same way. You often see it as part of the scenery, but not necessarily in a way that tells you the author thought about "does this work out?". Being vaguely aware that logistics are a thing is good, but a commitment to having the world make sense is better, and rarer.

What value do you see in "putting thought" into "everything" subject to the stipulation that those thoughts are worthless?

"What value so you see under the stipulation that there is no value?" is a rather uninteresting question.

REPLY (1) Michael Watts 12h

"What value so you see under the stipulation that there is no value?" is a rather uninteresting question.

Well, yes, that's what I had thought, but you're the one who claimed that the value was there.

REPLY (1) Voyager 2h

Which means asking me to stipulate there is no value is begging the question.

If you mean something specific where we can actually discuss whether any value remains, like for example "the attempt to explain it doesn't end up making sense", you should specify it.

REPLY The original Mr. X 13h

This is why I took issue with the Tolkein example. First, it's clearly explained in the story that the eagles won't fly over the lands of Men because they fear being shot with arrows.

OTOH they do then fly to Mordor to rescue Frodo and Sam without being deterred by the prospect of bow-wielding men. Granted you could say that was a special case, but it's not immediately obvious why that was more special than the quest to get the Ring to Mt. Doom in the first place.

REPLY (1) Brenton Baker 8h

It's a special case because the heroes had just vanquished the earthly embodiment of darkness and evil after completing a quest which was seen by everyone involved as almost impossible. Much easier to help after the thing is done.

REPLY __browsing 2d

Not disagreeing with any of the above, but if there's one thing AI should be capable of, it's logical consistency.

REPLY (3) Bugmaster 2d

I mean, yeah, maybe it should -- but currently it isn't, due to its stochastic nature.

REPLY dubious 2d

But why?

AI "is capable of" logical consistency as much as a human is capable of such. That is, a human can be logically consistent or not.

I think the above statement is meant to imply "AI should always be logically consistent" but why would it have a higher bar than a human? We should expect some AI to be "less intelligent" than a human, and some "more intelligent" than a human. So if a human is inconsistently logical, some AI should also be inconsistently logical.

Perhaps this is a result of a by-association fallacy; AI = computer = logic. Perhaps this is "AI has always been portrayed as highly logical and not understanding emotion," so it's the default expectation.

But if you think about it, anything resembling human intelligence _must_ be able to be illogical, and we should expect this.

REPLY (1) __browsing 2d

"AI "is capable of" logical consistency as much as a human is capable of such"

No. Computers are vastly more capable of logical consistency than humans are, because consistently applying logic is the task they were created to perform. An AI built on top of cutting-edge computing hardware that can't do logical consistency is clearly not taking proper advantage of the hardware.

REPLY (2) dubious 2d

Humans are "built on top of" physics and math which are utterly consistent. A human that can't do logical consistency is clearly not taking proper advantage of the hardware.

But they don't. for many reasons. High among these is many things are inherently ambiguous and how and whether logical consistency applies is not well-defined. "Intelligence" in the human sense is capable of dealing with this, simply by being illogical and not requiring consistency.

Given a highly skilled, top-0.01% computer user, capable of coding nearly anything and using cutting-edge math software, how would this person take advantage of the computer to determine plot structure consistency, or whether a character is acting out-of-character or not?

REPLY (1) __browsing 2d Edited

" human that can't do logical consistency is clearly not taking proper advantage of the hardware"

We solved that problem by inventing actual hardware.

Beyond that, what is the purpose of your remarks here, exactly? Are you pissing on me because I don't personally know how to program an AGI and can't provide a direct roadmap to get there? If I knew the answer to the question of "how do we meld classical AI with neural net techniques to reach post-human capabilities" I wouldn't be arguing with you on the internet, I'd be headed to the patent office or at least trying to get hired at Anthropic.

I am simply commenting on the irony that Moravec's Paradox would lead one to expect that the kind of bleeding edge AI capable of exceeding human capacities in areas which machines traditionally found very difficult would not suddenly become bad at things which machines traditionally found very easy.

REPLY Bugmaster 1d

The entire reason "AI" (i.e. Large Language Models) works at all is precisely because it works stochastically, employing gradient descent to approximate a solution to what would otherwise be intractable mathematical equations. This is why you get a slightly different result out of it every time you input the exact same prompt. A purely deterministic version of the LLM (which could function as well as real ones do) can only exist in the imagination of mathematicians, as it would require more computing power than it is even theoretically possible to obtain.

REPLY Bob Bobberson 2d

I've found that it's often not. If a character is 23 in chapter 4, and chapter 7 takes place six months later, for some reason the character will suddenly be 28. Stuff like that happens all the time when I try to get AI to write stories for me.

REPLY Stonehead 2d

Yeah, I thought that was a strange point to make. The only difference between the Star Wars example and the Ultra Man example is how much impactful to the story they are. Hiding Luke on Tatooine is the final story beat of the entire prequel trilogy, so it's a more significant flaw than a ~20% difference in laser range. The Last Jedi was even more significant because multiple story arcs were completely dependent on one scene that makes no sense.

The difference isn't in who is nitpicking, it's in how big of an issue they're nitpicking.

REPLY (1) Mary Catelli 2d

The problem is that you are stuck with Luke on Tatooine. You were painted into a corner in the first film, before Darth Vader was Luke's father.

REPLY (1) Stonehead 1d

Yes and no. As of the writing of Empire, you're stuck with Luke growing up on Tatooine. You aren't stuck with Vader also having grown up on Tatooine.

As far as I know the original trilogy doesn't imply that Luke was hidden from Vader intentionally. It isn't until the prequels that Lucas establishes that Tatooine was also Anakin's childhood home. And it isn't until Revenge of the Sith that he establishes Obi Wan is chose Tatooine to intentionally hide Luke on.

I believe the old expanded universe establishes that Vader hates Tatooine and refuses to go there because of his painful memories. Supposedly thats why Obi Wan chose Tatooine, but it isn't hinted at anywhere in the films.

REPLY (1) Mary Catelli 1d

Then why are Luke's aunt and uncle on Tatooine? Especially since Owen and Beru clearly knew Luke's father?

REPLY (2) Stonehead 1d

I mean, I have aunts and uncles who live in a different country. They know my parents too.

That doesn't seem too hard to explain.

REPLY (1) Mary Catelli 1d

But it does require an explanation, even to put them in another country. Another planet?

Especially when the one who moved did so to a place of poverty and harsh environment.

REPLY (1) Stonehead 20h

I would disagree, but to each their own.

I prefer media that doesn't feel the need to explain every little detail to the audience. A plot hole is when a story contradicts its own internal rules. Not when background details aren't explicitly explained.

REPLY (1) Mary Catelli 15h

Ah, the thing is that one of the internal rules usually defaults to "These are normal human beings reacting normally." You can develop the characters to act abnormally, or you can explain why what appears to be abnormal is actually normal conduct, but that's not a little detail.

And it's important because if the characters aren't people, we don't get invested, and the whole thing is pointless as art.

REPLY (1) Stonehead 14h

We're talking about explaining why siblings don't live near each other, right? To me that doesn't strike me as something outside the range of normal human behavior. Definitely not abnormal enough to warrant an explanation when screentime is so limited.

I mean, I agree with everything you just wrote. I just think "this kid's aunt and uncle might live in a different place than his father grew up" would comfortably fall under "These are normal human beings reacting normally."

REPLY (1) Mary Catelli 13h

Except that the objection was that it was a bad place to hide Luke.

REPLY John Schilling 21h

"Aunt" and "Uncle" are quite flexible terms in practice, particularly when remarriage and/or adoption are factored in. I'm "Uncle Bro" to at least half a dozen people, only two of whom are biological nieces and nephews.

The OT makes it clear that there is a Skywalker family on Tattoine, which Luke has been living with his entire life. Aunts and Uncles come with the package, however you came to be a part of it. That's entirely consistent with, e.g., Luke's grandparents having a son who walked out on the family to join the Empire and left an abandoned kid to be raised by an aunt and uncle. It's also compatible with a mysterious stranger dropping off a foundling who gets taken in and everybody agrees to call the primary caregivers "Aunt" and "Uncle" rather than "Foster Parent Alpha" and "Foster Parent Beta". Lots of ways to make that work in the OT, even after we know Vader is Luke's father.

There aren't any glaring anomalies until the Prequel trilogy, and even that at least properly explains why Luke has a step-uncle on Tattoine (his grandmother Shmi lived there her entire life, and her family expanded to include more than just Luke).

REPLY (1) Mary Catelli 20h

You skipped the second part. His aunt and uncle knew his father.

Furthermore, the normal terms for a foundling to use for the couple who raised him are Mother and Father. Like, oh, Leia does.

REPLY (1) John Schilling 19h

Nothing about this relationship is normal, and not everybody maps the normal terms onto abnormal circumstances the way you do. We don't, as of the OT, have enough information to say anything substantial and conclusive about this, and there are many ways to make it fit.

REPLY (1) Mary Catelli 17h

Does that mean that there's no problem with Anakin and Luke's both growing up there?

REPLY (1) John Schilling 15h

There's no problem with (person who is Luke's biological father) growing up on Tattoine. And there is no problem with (person who will become Darth Vader) growing up on Tattoine, so long as he leaves Luke there when he takes off to become co-ruler of the galaxy. All of those can be fit very easily into the story we see in the OT.

It isn't a problem until we learn that Obi-Wan chose to hide Luke Skywaker on Tattoine, and in the care of a fairly distant relative at that. Even in TPM, we can imagine a solution where e.g. Jedi Anakin is stationed on or frequently sent to Tattoine (because local familiarity), ex-Queen Padme joins him there, so Luke is born on Tattoine and it's more trouble than it's worth to remove him.

REPLY (1) Mary Catelli 13h

Except that it was also a matter of *hiding* him.

REPLY (1) Continue thread → Garreth Miley 2d

That's a horrible poem. 'The sun will rise again - and so shall you.' So like I'm a whole bunch of firey plasma stuck in a vacuum? Is that all I have to look forward to? Shame on you ai.

REPLY (4) Bugmaster 2d

I don't know, I kind of like that line (in isolation). When normal people think of the Sun, they usually envision an indomitable source of light and warmth, not plasma in a vacuum.

REPLY (2) Garreth Miley 2d

I'm from Ireland so my only concept of the sun is something I imagine. I tried to see it in the way that you're suggesting but I'm sorry it's just not working. I'm just a blob out there in terrifying space. I'm never completely alone - Clooney is always somewhere off in the distance tapping on the windows of spaceships with single ladies in them. It's terribly creepy.

REPLY Kveldred 2d

Yeah, I don't find that line so terrible. It's the rest that's horribad (esp. the first line 🤮)...

REPLY Yug Gnirob 2d

The sun will rise again - and so shall you: The South.

REPLY (2) Guy 2d

Good campaign slogan in Japan maybe, matches the flag.

REPLY Kveldred 2d

SWRA 🫡

REPLY Simone 2d

"But what if I die while I'm sleeping at night, huh? What then?"

REPLY (1) TGGP 2d

You'll wake up dead.

REPLY Melvin 2d

The big problem with the .staohir is that it's out of place.

"You shall rise again" makes sense in two contexts, the Christian context and the you-shall-overcome-this-adversity context. But neither of these contexts is established so it is out of place.

REPLY (1) Jeffrey Soreff 1d Edited

That's fair. I was reading it as possibly either of these interpretations (with the second making the poem feel foreign to me since I'm not a Christian - but still reasonable for a Christian intended audience). Since the poem is short, I'm content to take the context as presumed, with the absence of establishing it not fatal. But it is perfectly legitimate to take the absence of establishing the context as a severe flaw. De gustibus non est disputandum.

More globally, I view judgements on the quality of poems as (usually) very dependent on the (anticipated?) audience. A choice of rhyming pattern may sound

• musical and memorable to some

• a clever reference to a prior example to others

• a banal repetition of an overused motif to yet others

I don't see any of these reactions as right or wrong. Frequently, all three audiences exist.

It _is_ possible to have works so awful that _everyone_ will agree that they are awful. If someone insists on using a massive concrete wall unironically as a metaphor for openness, few readers will be pleased...

edit: The difference in the audiences is expressed in several peoples' comments as the difference between newbies and connoisseurs. Ok. It is worth noting that _no one_ can be a connoisseur about _everything_ . Life is too short. So, while the more sophisticated knowledge connoisseurs bring to bear has its good points, it is _also_ a good idea to refrain from denigrating the surface level appreciation newbies have for art works. Even the connoisseurs are newbies in areas of art _other_ than their particular specialty.

REPLY Bugmaster 2d

FWIW I think that Medieval Venice flag is indeed a bad one. It's got so much going on that there's nowhere for the eye to find purchase. I much prefer the California Republic flag, or the real Bhutan flag. They aren't boring, but they don't bludgeon you with irrelevant details either. Flags are supposed to send a message, and the message in both cases is clear: "We Love Communist Bears" vs. "Fear the Sunrise Dragon". The only message the Medieval Venice flag sends is, "we've got more money than taste yet all that money still can't buy talent".

REPLY (4) Victualis 2d

The Venice flag is sending a very clear message: we have lots of money, and if you can't see the flag on the battlefield we don't care because we aren't paying our mercenaries for optics (and we are paying for lots of mercenaries so don't mess with us).

REPLY (3) Simone 2d

Also probably "we do everything by committee so we couldn't make any of the families unhappy" I think.

REPLY thepast 2d

I was thinking: “we have access to more Eastern dyes than you; surrender.”

REPLY Jeffrey Soreff 1d Edited

Also: "We have great glassmakers - buy our magnifying glasses!" :-)

REPLY Deiseach 2d

That Venetian flag was indeed so over-detailed, I looked it up to see if this was indeed the version of the time, and the answer is "more or less".

The state flag, which that image is, had the main flag with the lion plus six fringes (those are all the busy bits to the right). It looks better in a version like this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flag_of_the_Republic_of_Venice#/media/File:Venezia-DSCF9899.JPG

The flag image for this post is the state flag so would have been hanging up in the important buildings and carried in solemn processions, not used on the battlefield:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flag_of_the_Republic_of_Venice

"Its main charge was the Lion of Saint Mark, symbolizing Mark the Evangelist, the patron saint of Venice. A distinguishing feature of the flag is its six fringes, which were added to represent the original six sestiere of Venice. The fringes also serve to prevent damage being caused to the central section of the flag by wind.

During times of peace, the Lion of Saint Mark was depicted alongside an open book. However, when the Republic was at war the Bible was replaced with the lion grasping an upright sword. During the corteo dogale (lit. 'procession of the doges'), four banners of Saint Mark with different background colours, white, purple, blue, and red, were carried, with the one in front representing the state of the republic at that time (at peace, in a truce, in an alliance, at war, respectively). When at war, the war version of the Lion of Saint Mark was used."

I think "yellow lion on red background" would not be bad.

REPLY (1) MM 2d

The different flags are another indication of how rich they are, that they can change out all their flags on the regular (Venice was at war a lot).

I suppose it also calls back to the Romans opening the temple doors (the one to Mars I think) when at war.

REPLY (1) Thomas Castriensis 2d

I believe you're referring to the Gates of Janus.

REPLY R Dana 2d

"Aren't boring, but don't have irrelevant detail." <- This is very nicely put.

Isn't another way to put it: 'something that can be readily grokked'? Maine's tree design and California's bear have detail that's invisible for many flag applications, but are very easy to recognize and understand at first impression or from a distance. You can't remove much without changing the flag, and stylizing the bear or tree to remove detail might be OK but isn't necessary.

Venice is so busy that it takes a ton of time to see what all the other crap is besides the winged lion, none of which are relevant or helpful to the winged-lion design. I agree with you - it could be improved by removing (many) elements.

Compare, for example, to the flags of Russia, Slovakia, Slovenia, Croatia, Serbia, and the Netherlands, which are minimalistic to the point where they're the same (horizontal red/white/blue, sometimes plus crest) at first impression. Not sure where Reddit stands on them, but there's no way I'm telling those apart across a battlefield.

^This brings up another point: your flag's design isn't in a vacuum! It matters (to recognizability) who else is using similar color schemes and arrangements.

REPLY Bugmaster 2d

Speaking of bears, here's the flag of Zheleznogorsk, Russia:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zheleznogorsk,_Krasnoyarsk_Krai#/media/File:Flag_of_Zheleznogorsk.svg

And yes, the city was established as a factory complex for production of plutonium.

REPLY (1) Jeffrey Soreff 1d

<mildSnark>

Does whichever city specializing in the fusion component of their bombs have a bear pushing two nuclei together instead? :-)

</mildSnark>

REPLY Nicholas Halden 2d

I’d love it if you published a list of your favorite poems

REPLY (1) Vaclav 2d

Yeah I'd be interested in this too. (Or a lower-effort, lower-stakes version that is just 'here are some poems I like'.) Not so that I can judge Scott's taste, but because I think it probably overlaps with my own enough that I'd enjoy some of his recommendations.

REPLY Andrew Currall 2d

Mmm, lots of thoughts.

Not very important, but:

I (like almost everyone) hate modern architecture, and prefer ornamented elaborate older styles.

I also dislike modern fashion, and prefer ornamented, colourful, embroidered older styles.

I (mostly) dislike modern music, and prefer "ornamented" baroque music. And to the limited extent that I do like modern music, I like mass-market trashy pop music, which isn't the "arty" alternative.

But for some reason I prefer minimalist flags, and think that Venetian flag is an abomination. I have no justification for this.

Are people who care about these things better, more tasteful readers than the rest of us?

The thing about this is, OK getting this sort of thing right may not be that important. But getting it right *doesn't hurt the work of art for those who don't care about it*. This contrasts strongly, with, say, modern architecture.

City Project Investors, Inc” is also extremely easy and not new or interesting, but it doesn’t seem as bad

Disagree here. City Project Investors, Inc sounds *much worse* than Infinita to me. At least Infinita is vaguely cool, in a somewhat low-brow way.

REPLY (4) Kveldred 2d Edited

Ha-ha! I am more regressive than are you: I prefer all of those things too—*and* like the Venetian flag!

...agree again on City Project Investors, Inc., though. It's bad. It's dull as dishwasher!

REPLY Johan Domeij 2d

I dislike (rather than hate) much of modern architecture, though I think it has been improving since the -80's. I like many old buildings, both in ornamented and plain styles: Think of an old log cabin for example. But when a modern building tries to emulate an old style, I almost always hate it unless done very thoughtfully. The thing I hate most is fake-ness: Like when a concrete building has a façade of plastic moulded with wood-grain. In that case I'd rather have the brutalist concrete underneath, because at least it is true.

Now, what if the fake façade is very well made, and convincing? Well, then I observe an uncanny-valley-like effect in myself: If It's blatantly obviously fake, then I'll roll my eyes and move on with my life. It's the ugliest, but I don't care much. If the fake is better, and I'm convinced for a minute, then I'll hate it with a passion: It almost got me! But if it's truly convincing, and I only notice when someone points it out or after careful examination, then it's earned my grudging respect. But none of that will impress me like if the actual underlying structure of the building is in itself beautiful, without decoration. Many ships and airplanes and bridges and tools and old buildings have this quality, a beautiful shape derived primarily from function, or from a thoughtful marriage of function with artistic twist, or artistic intent strongly constrained by function.

I don't have a coherent theory of aesthetics where this fits, this is more an observation about myself.

When it comes to music I've never found any coherent theory of my taste that predicts it better than "I like what I'm used to, with slight variations". Of course, saying it like that feels very demeaning. And yet ¯\(ツ)/¯

REPLY (2) Bob Bobberson 2d

One fact that bears mentioning is that a lot of great stone architecture, many Greek and Indian temples for example, is actually shaped to imitate older, less durable constructions in materials like wood and clay. So if we want architecture to be fully honest about its materials and construction, we have to go back centuries or perhaps millennia before Christ.

I'm not sure exactly what lesson to draw from this. One rule of thumb is that imitations are ok when they match or improve the original in terms of factors like durability, when they cost more, or require more effort. Or just when they look really good.

A lot of imitations are just obviously cheap, shamelessly and unconvincingly deceptive, not built to last, and not aesthetically designed. I think it makes sense to hate them mainly on that basis, not on being imitations per se. I don't think we're hypocrites to feel this way, I think this is exactly what Vitruvius thought.

REPLY (1) Jeffrey Soreff 1d

Well, some e.g. medieval architecture had some aspects, e.g. crenelations, which were quite honestly functional, given the arms, tactics, and materials of the time.

<mildSnarkGallowsHumor>

I wonder if Putin has had any building constructed with a plank fastened to the roof and a target painted on the pavement below. Given what happens to his critics, it would be honestly functional for his term in office... :-)

</mildSnarkGallowsHumor>

REPLY (1) Bob Bobberson 1d

That's why I tend to flinch at crenellations built in the last few centuries. They no longer have any use besides decoration, especially in north America where they've been decorative elements for most of our history, but they're pretty terrible as decorations. There's no complexity to the design, no curves to make them soothing on the eye, no patterns or proportion.

In parts of India and the Middle East they've put more work into adapting crenellations to decorative use, so that tends to look much less jarring, particularly because of the more rounded tops. They've given it a solid try in certain types of European gothic revival architecture too, which in some cases works far better than it does in America, but still, the results don't usually impress me much.

REPLY (1) Jeffrey Soreff 1d

Many Thanks!

That's why I tend to flinch at crenellations built in the last few centuries. They no longer have any use besides decoration, especially in north America where they've been decorative elements for most of our history, but they're pretty terrible as decorations.

That's fair. Google/Gemini says that in the 16th and 17th centuries, they were actually used here, but not after those times.

REPLY Andrew Currall 1d

I will agree with you on the “improving since the 80s” thing. A bit. I wonder if that’s partly because a lot of 80s buildings are dirty, though, and recent modern buildings tend to be cleaner. But I think I agree even past that- Brutalism was horrible; modern glass constructions are definitely a bit better. I don’t agree about the fakeness thing, though- I love McMansions (and repro furniture). While an obviously fake thing is worse than something that looks real; it’s still far better than a modern style.

REPLY Hedonic Escalator 2d

As someone who feels as instinctively certain about the aesthetic superiority of modern architecture as you apparently do about its inferiority, I still have a hard time believing that disliking modern architecture is not just a quirk of online rationalist-adjacent spaces. I can't prove it, but as evidence I offer the fact that wallpapers and artwork depicting modern cityscapes are extremely popular.

REPLY (4) Melvin 2d Edited

A mass of skyscrapers looks good from a distance, but not from up close. Rare is the modern building that looks particularly good when you're standing across the street from it.

REPLY (1) Hedonic Escalator 1d

Believe it or not, I have seen at least several buildings up close during my lifetime, and I still think modern architecture looks better.

My favorite thing to do while visiting a new city is to take a walk and look at the architecture. Modern buildings trivially mog at night, but even in the daytime there's a lot to appreciate. I love how I can look up at a skyscraper and see its neighbor reflected in it. Modern cities look alive in a way that traditional architecture simply can't replicate.

I'd take San Francisco or Hong Kong over Edinburgh any day.

REPLY lin 1d

Upvote. I have no tastes of any sophistication in any domain, and I think modern architecture is great. The persistent ACX habit of casually insisting that all those pretty modern buildings are somehow being built against the people’s will—is that how capitalism works?—is weirder and more off-putting the more it goes on.

REPLY (1) Hedonic Escalator 1d

I don't blame him, Typical Mind Fallacy is a hell of a drug.

REPLY Bob Bobberson 1d

There is an undeniable beauty in the modern skyline, especially at night. But the most beloved individual buildings in cities do tend to be relatively old. The Chrysler Building and the Empire State are getting close to a hundred.

So I'm trying to understand, when you say modern does that include the early 20th century, or by modern do you mean firmly within living memory? If you are talking about the later 20th century or early 21st, does it include more postmodern stuff like the San Francisco Federal Building, or you mean more the sleek glass towers of Hong Kong?

REPLY (2) Hedonic Escalator 1d

I like the Burj Khalifa (2009), the Shenzhen Galaxy Twin Towers (2021), and the Las Vegas Sphere (2023), so definitely some new ones in there. I also like the Chrysler Building and the Space Needle. Empire State I have no personal impression of, but it looks fine.

Even though I've probably seen it several times, I have no impression of the San Francisco Federal Building. It's fine, I don't love or hate it.

I don't know what you consider "postmodern," but I'm a fan of the Museum of Pop Culture, which Wikipedia informs me is by a famous postmodern architect.

REPLY (1) Bob Bobberson 1d

I can totally understand the appeal of Shenzhen and Dubai. I can see a line between the Parthenon and Notre Dame and some of the buildings there, I can see something like a universal human aesthetic sense manifested through the best methods available to the people at the time. The column and the flying buttress were originally just the best way to make a tall building that allowed light in, so in an important sense, steel frames and clear panes of glass are exactly the same thing. Form follows function, as they say.

When it comes to the more postmodern stuff, I have a lot more trouble grasping the appeal. There's some novelty value, sure. But I can't see either an aesthetic or a structural point to the way most of them are designed, and it sort of feels like a big joke at my expense. "Oh, you wanted to this to have a point? You wanted it to look good? How quaint."

I guess I can see some appeal in how the Museum of Pop Culture displays the qualities of metal, and just in the sheer whimsical creativity of it. Is it sort of like, postmodernism is to modernism as mannerism is to renaissance?

REPLY (1) Hedonic Escalator 7h Edited

Here are some more postmodern buildings I like, what do you think of them?

Westin Bonaventure Hotel

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Westin_Bonaventure_Hotel

https://www.sfgate.com/la/article/los-angeles-bonaventure-hotel-history-19511087.php

Perhaps better known for its striking Brutalist interior than its exterior, this hotel is iconic and controversial. I think it makes great use of light and shape.

The Shard

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Shard

It's called "The Shard", you look at it, that's a shard all right, exactly as advertised. I like how its outer faces almost sit on top of the building.

Art Tower Mito

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Art_Tower_Mito

https://amazingarchitecture.com/skyscrapers/art-tower-mito-in-japan-by-arata-isozaki

This one I haven't had the chance to see in person, but it speaks for itself.

Unlike Scott, I think Piazza d'Italia is whimsical rather than insulting.

I don't believe this is considered postmodern, but I'm also a fan of everything by MAD architects, such as Sheraton Huzhou Hot Spring Resort, One River North, or the new Lucas museum.

https://www.archdaily.com/office/mad-architects

I also like Heatherwick Studio. Coal Drops Yard and the Vessel were cool, and I hope I get a chance to see some of their other work.

Tell me this doesn't spark joy in your heart:

https://images.adsttc.com/media/images/5d14/5f94/284d/d158/4b00/0159/slideshow/02_SheratonHuzhou_Hot_Spring_Resort.jpg

https://heatherwick.com/wp-content/uploads/Universidad-Ean_1_Heatherwick-Studio_CREDIT_NOD-2-scaled.jpg

(The second one is a bit too much by my personal tastes, but it's got joy.)

I agree that the SF Federal Building is mid. In general, postmodernism isn't my favorite style, something like the organic forms of the linked examples is. Some examples of postmodern buildings just look bad to me, such as the Vanna Venturi House, though I think that one deserves credit for being genuinely groundbreaking. I posit that it is difficult to break rules correctly, but if you can pull it off you get something really cool. It also helps to make your postmodern buildings stuff that people expect to look weird, like art museums.

I also think that many postmodern buildings that have mid exteriors have great interiors. Seattle public library, for example.

REPLY Andrew Currall 1d

I don’t have strong views about this; if a modern building looks nice to me I’m happy with it. I just think most don’t. Without knowing much about early 20th century architecture, I think I mostly like it.

The SF Federal Building is hideous; glass towers aren’t great, but they’re slightly better.

REPLY (1) Bob Bobberson 1d

Personally I do see the appeal of glass towers, but I can also understand why some people don't. I think you can make a decently compelling case for or against them.

The SF Federal Building just baffles me though. I have trouble imagining how even an alien could think that style of architecture looks nice.

REPLY Andrew Currall 1d

as you apparently do about its inferiority

I don’t think I’d quite endorse this-this is obviously a matter of taste. I don’t think you’re wrong to prefer modern styles as such; I’m just saying I don’t.

But I do think you’re wrong to attribute this to rationalists; the general public definitely prefers traditional architecture; pretty much every study on the topic has found this. E.g.:

https://www.civicart.org/news-and-events/2020/10/13/ncasharris-survey-shows-americans-overwhelmingly-prefer-traditional-architecture-for-federal-buildings

https://adamarchitecture.com/publication/yougov-survey-2009/

There’s loads more.

REPLY (2) Bob Bobberson 1d

I think you're right about this. Normal people seem to prefer more old fashioned and revivalist styles, sometimes to an extent I find tacky. I'm not a fan of McMansions with half-assed Tudor elements, for sure.

The fact that so many modern and postmodern buildings exist isn't proof that average people love them, it's just proof that their dislike isn't strong enough to fully erase the profit margin, and/or that certain wealthy people can afford to disproportionately force their tastes onto regular people. Market failures and unequal concentrations of wealth are the most well known issues with capitalism, so I'm not sure why people are suddenly treating them like some kind of obscure conspiracy theory. Besides, this isn't even limited to capitalism. Any type of society is going to have some tradeoff between beauty and functionality, which is why a lot of Soviet housing looked notoriously bland even though they were also willing and able to build some more traditionally nice looking stuff, like the Moscow subway for instance.

REPLY Hedonic Escalator 7h

Fair on the second link, though I object to the first. I also think most government buildings should be neoclassical, because that's the aesthetic I associate with the government, independent of my personal favorite styles.

REPLY Billy Hamilton 21h

Interesting. I dislike some of the same things you dislike, but what I really *like* is not the baroque ornamental version, but the style of simple "classical" beauty.

For example, I am drawn to simple but beautiful classical architecture, or simple but beautiful clothing (like loose white gowns that drape over the human form), or simple but beautiful music (like human voices singing in harmony).

REPLY Pelorus 2d

Plot holes might matter less in science fantasy action films, you're carried along by the momentum of the story and don't have time when watching to reflect on the parts that don't make sense. In a longer-form experience, a novel perhaps, plot holes are more noticeable and potentially more fatal for immersion.

REPLY (3) Voyager 2d

Or even worse, serial releases like tv series or web novels. A good book you might be you're engrossed in what happens next and not look back to compare the details, just like a movie. "Fridge logic" is called that because you only notice at the fridge, after the experience.

But if it is released episode by episode, then after every episode you get to rethink the experience, make predictions what happens next, share your thoughts with others, etc. And then in the next episode you'll be firmly aware how it should work, and if it doesn't, you'll see right through it.

REPLY Nancy Lebovitz 2d

I'm reminded of The Fifth Element. It's ridiculous and it's a classic. It does have some rules, like that the taxi driver isn't going to suddenly have magic powers.

REPLY MaxEd 2d

I absolutely love the way Nick Harkaway writes, but damn, plot holes in his novels are so glaring I just... Grrr! I dock a point on my GoodReads ratings of his books, that's what I do! (read "Gone Away World" and "Gnomon" so far, enjoyed both, but I feel my enjoyment would be much higher if I wasn't asking myself "why this thing happened the way it happened, if it's absolutely impossible, and isn't even hand-waved away?!", and I don't just mean little details, but stuff like "how the fuck are you going to build a pipe that surrounds the world when there are oceans in the way?" and "how the fuck are you going to build a total surveillance society where surveillance does not exclude ruling elites and famous and rich people, short of a bloody revolution which you hasn't mentioned anywhere in the text?").

REPLY (2) Pelorus 2d

I'll forgive this in novels which are meant to be a bit absurd in their premises, like Meiville's Railsea. But if it plays it straight, I'd like at least figleaf of plausibility too.

REPLY (1) MaxEd 2d

I like my books to be thought experiments, when author makes up some premise and everything else follows logically from it. What I don't like is when author has a set conclusion, and then twists or even ignores his own premise, characters and setting until he gets what he wants. The premise might be utterly unreal and fantastic - like in "Railsea", - but everything else has to follow the rules set by it (not all rules have to be directly revealed to the reader, I guess, but it should be possible to at least take guess at them). Well, not every book has to be this way, but... Even in lightweight comedies, I find myself wishing for at least some consistency. Which is why I don't particularly like early Rincewind adventures, for example: the setting works on entirely ass-pulls for teh lulz, as they used to say. Later Discworld novels are much better in that respect.

REPLY (2) Pelorus 1d

Sure I've been rereading the Discworld Witches novels recently and Pratchett changes his mind continually about how the magic is meant to work, so while it's often unnoticeable in any one novel, if you read a lot in succession the inconsistencies are clearer. (For example, in Equal Rites witch magic only works on living things, then in Wyrd sisters it works on rocks as well.)

REPLY Voyager 1d

I hate it when comedy doesn't take its premise seriously. Humor is subversion of expectations, and it works better if the expectation is properly set up, and the subversion doesn't invalidate the expectation entirely.

The worst are harmless and ineffective villains. Lucky Luke's Bob Dalton really is a dangerous desperado, and that makes the visual humor of how short he is work much better.

REPLY Jeffrey Soreff 1d

"how the fuck are you going to build a total surveillance society where surveillance does not exclude ruling elites and famous and rich people, short of a bloody revolution which you hasn't mentioned anywhere in the text?"

nit: I don't think that is so implausible. E.g. I doubt that Google's or NSA's data gathering has special if/then statements to exclude Elon Musk. Once the infrastructure is built, a lot of surveillance happens by default.

REPLY Hoopdawg 2d

There are people who think that any poem that rhymes is an “easy win” and therefore tasteless, or any art that looks like anything, or any building with ornament or symmetry. I hate this outlook, but then what do I mean when I admit there’s some sense in which easy wins are bad?

You mean that you stand by your taste, which is different from that of those other people, and that's okay, taste is subjective anyway.

You may add that you've considered their objections, Chesterton-fence-style, but decided they're too restrictive or incoherent and can therefore be discarded.

What you probably don't want to do is proclaim that the idea of taste is fake, because what follows from that is inability to discriminate or grade at all.

REPLY (2) Simone 2d

I think in this case he refers more to the idea of "taste" as some objective quality that people develop by learning more about a field, rather than the obvious notion that subjectively everyone likes different things.

REPLY (1) Hoopdawg 2d

But "obvious notion that subjectively everyone likes different things" also implies inability to discriminate or grade. Scott himself doesn't want that.

What we want is a (less obvious?) notion that everyone likes and dislikes different things for reasons which are subjective (as in, depend on context in which they were acquired), but can still be valid and legitimate. (And for any individual person should probably be assumed to be valid and legitimate by default - not because they necessarily are, I certainly agree that some tastemaking smells like pure ingroup status gatekeeping - but for basic epistemic humility. Again, Chesterton's Fence.)

REPLY (1) Andrew Wurzer 2d

My read: Scott's essay seems to assume there is something about taste that is objective -- not only something objective, but something that can truly be measured. I don't know that I'd agree that is true.

1) We're social creatures and we tend to cluster around ideas / "tastes" that carry status within hierarchies of groups we care about. That makes many aspects of taste seem more "objective" than they are: people seem to "share" tastes; so what could that be if not some objective kind of taste that they all just happen to be perceiving?

2) We all evolved roughly the same way, and that fact grants increased weights to various kinds of beauty or art that are more common than others, though it's pretty clear that those are far from one-dimensional.

3) There are phenomenological forms of beauty. I suppose one could claim that if one is unable to rank or decompose these experiences into definitional parts that one simply lacks basic intellectual skills or ability, but I rather suspect it's that the thing does something to you on a visceral level. What's the difference between beauty in art and beauty in a sunset? A sunset isn't art. But art *can* be beautiful like a sunset. The sublime? Are there "gauche" or "lame" sunsets?

REPLY Mister_M 1d

I don't think "taste is subjective" is the right move here. Of course it's (partly) subjective, but calling it subjective doesn't help us understand it. I think him "admit[ting] that easy wins are bad" is an attempt to find a somewhat-consistent rationale for his taste, or at least to identify patterns (and incidentally having difficulty). If you're trying to understand your own tastes, you're building a model of how you would respond to a wide variety of things.

REPLY (1) Hoopdawg 1d

I mean, we're talking about a person who has basically rejected the notion of taste because he disagrees with other people about what's good and bad (or rather, with certain social conventions about what's good and bad). He can't start finding a rationale for his taste until he recognizes that "his taste" is a valid conceptual category.

REPLY Brinedew 2d

You feel like they’re manipulating you into feeling impressed.

This sentence is a good gateway to empathise how "highbrow" people feel about recently made highly ornamented architecture. I believe the term for that is "Kitsch".

REPLY (1) Domo Sapiens 2d

Yet those same "highbrow" people do not feel like the highly ornamented language that they employ for their preferred art is "Kitsch".

I kind of feel like this whole arts&taste discussion is just about values and status games again.

REPLY (1) Rosencrantz 2d

Actually it's not wrong to like the modern building or artwork and dislike the language used to discuss it. I think that section of the Venn diagram is where all the best practitioners are in fact.

REPLY (1) Domo Sapiens 2d

I'm not so sure, my experience is that practitioners often embrace that language too. I'm not judging, it's probably influenced by the circles they move in, get funded by and maybe even a certain feeling of having to commit to it.

My strategy compartmentalizing: Enjoying the art, independent and even despite of the artist. In some philosophical sense, once the art is made and published, it is not the artist's anymore.

REPLY (1) Tossrock 2d

"When art critics get together they talk about form and structure and meaning. When artists get together they talk about where you can buy cheap turpentine."

REPLY Xpym 2d

My only strong opinion about flags is all those Muslim ones with swords are ridiculously bad. Well, they are good insofar as they correctly identify those countries as backward and violent, but I imagine that's not the intent.

REPLY (1) Timothy M. 2d

Aside from the obvious objection, there's, like, two Arab flags with swords. By comparison there's four flags that are basically the flag of Yemen with a bit of stuff added.

REPLY (2) EpistemicHummusility 2d

Wow you aren't kidding! I looked it up and Yemen, Iraq, and Syria all have basically the same flag. I also never put it together that the Palestinian flag is almost identical to the Jordanian flag but lacks the star and has a slightly different triangle shape. Bahrain and Qatar also have similar flags: https://www.wikihow.com/Middle-Eastern-Flags

I knew that green and red were important colors in Islam but also learned from this that white, black, and yellow are also significant colors in that faith. From what I can see only Cyprus has a flag incorporating yellow, and it has a quite distinctive and appealing flag design to me.

In that region I think Cyprus and Lebanon have the two most distinctive, recognizable flags which would also still be able to be drawn by a child/ sewn up by a random seamstress. Props to those two because my own US state flag is fairly undrawable with a complex state seal design on it!!

REPLY (1) Timothy M. 2d

Syria changed their flag recently so it's less bad. But also Egypt is just Yemen with a cool bird.

For Palestine, you also have Western Sahara ("Muslim Palestine").

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pan-Arab_colors

REPLY Linch 14h

I'm often dazzled at the overconfident lack of intellectualism/curiosity on the internet these days.

Like do you think OP just saw 3 flags and generalized from there? How does somebody even make such an elementary mistake?

REPLY Daniel Parshall 2d

Somewhat relevant, a new band came through my YouTube Music feed, and I friggin LOVED it... unlike a lot of hip-hop which is rhythmically interesting but melodically boring, this had great melody AND harmony, some nice horn lines, good singer and backup vocals, the works! I'm super excited, and want to share a sample:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BvrZ5jdF5PY

Aaaaand the relevance here is because that is, apparently, ONE-HUNDRED PERCENT generated by AI. Honestly I didn't have a clue. I might have bad taste when it comes to some things, but as someone who's been deeply involved with jazz/blues music for 20 years, I'm going to count myself amongst the intelligentsia in this domain.

REPLY (3) avalancheGenesis 2d

Feel some regret at polluting my algorithm by clicking that, and it's of course a confounded judgement with the AI already exposed...but the "album art" immediately smacks of AI, the metadata (band name, "record label", date of release, account avatar, etc) have all the hallmarks of AI, and as to the actual music ... yeah, that's AI, highly suspect within just a few seconds. Suno and its ilk have improved tremendously in a short time, but are for now still in the "six fingered hand" stage. That distinctive crackly distortion where the vocals are stretching between token-sounds, the lyrics themselves not actually making much sense when considered as a whole (reads like AI writing), sounding way too clean without the other hallmarks expected of modern overproduced music - like the difference between "technically perfect" and "sanitized". Horns aren't particularly good synth samples either. Doesn't feel like hip-hop when there's no real flow, the AI can't spit. Yet.

In the spirit of the exercise though, I don't think that should retroactively diminish your enjoyment of the music? It's not like this band is claiming to actually be made of humans, and humans generate plenty of slop on their own without using AI. Oftentimes we even call that "pop music". If something in the thinking sand spoke to you, well, it spoke to you. And that's interesting in its own right, is it not?

REPLY (3) Daniel Parshall 2d Edited

FYI, you can right-click and "open in private window" for one-off checks like that; there's also a "downvote" button.

I agree that there are a couple of rhythmic choices I found "surprising"... but that's often analogous to "interesting" (e.g. Monk has any number of strange syncopations that actually build a lot of anticipation in the listener).

Maybe you listen to a lot more AI music than I do, so you can spot it more easily? But comparing to something from when I was a wee lad (and dinosaurs roamed the earth), given the other aesthetic choices within hiphop, my guess had been something from the late 90 or early 00s, like a later version of:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bA0O96JN0Os

It's easy to make postdictions; predictions are notably harder.

In any event, I agree it shouldn't retroactively diminish my enjoyment, and it definitely rises above plenty of commercial music today. I've also got extremely catholic taste; I can enjoy a generic blues band in a dive bar, or Dixieland records from over 100 years ago, and can draw distinctions between "technically skilled" and "I'm enjoying this"; they're correlated but not terribly tightly.

ETA: Can you elaborate on the tells/clues that let you clock it as being entirely AI-generated? Curious for my own reasons

REPLY (1) avalancheGenesis 1d

Huh, I wouldn't have compared it to the guys who did Rebirth of Slick (Cool Like Dat) at all.

It's...hard to put in words, more than what I already wrote. Someone else noted "the pitches getting clipped", which is also a nice way to put it. The transition isn't smooth between notes. It's going along one pitch and then realizing, oh shit, I need to switch to another one right now, let's just do that instead of bridging them in a natural fashion. Like listening to text-to-speech, which has also gotten leagues better over the years, but you can still tell it's made up of discrete building block parts rather than a unified whole.

I don't actually make a habit out of listening to AI music, it just registers very quickly as subtly "off" in a reflexive way, the same with AI art and AI writing. A machine that finds and makes patterns, versus a mind that's forged by evolution to detect patterns and their deviations...a discrepancy between "what my brain predicts as the next token" (not literally, just the acoustic equivalent of narrative violation in writing, what should the next proper beat be? like when someone sings off-key) and what sound actually gets output. Humans sometimes do intentional dissonance, of course - jazz, avant garde, drone. It's kind of fascinating to realize that the squeal of electric guitar feedback can sound pleasant if it's done just the right way! AI...doesn't do it the right way though, at least not yet. It's that sense of errors-not-intentionally-owned-as-errors that triggers me. When human artists make them, or they're imparted through the media (say, scratchy old vinyls), it feels warm and welcoming and alive; when AI does it, seemingly without noticing it does so, it's...strange?

Maybe it comes from exposure to vocaloid, distorted/remixed subgenres like nightcore, synth-heavy stuff like trance, etc? If you know what "machine music" frequently sounds like, then AI is in the same vein, even if it's more technically impressive in some ways. Sorry, I wish I could explain it better than just "it's a gestalt impression, I know it when I hear it"...

REPLY The Unimpressive Malcontent 2d

"and humans generate plenty of slop on their own without using AI"

This is what bothers me. People at large have already demonstrated that they don't care about authenticity or the human element by enjoying e.g. talentless autotune monkeys without reservation or sometimes even acknowledgement. The overwhelming majority of memes are slop, and people seem to love them (almost seems like the sloppiness is the point sometimes). But complaining about slop while picking and choosing which slop is and isn't okay just makes it clear that some less defensible opinion is being rationalized and framed in a misleading way instead. My guess is shallow contrarianism because people are mostly just sick of hearing about AI. Could be wrong on the last point.

REPLY (2) Kenny Easwaran 2d

There’s a mix here. Some people who love human slop are criticizing AI slop just because they recognize it as such. But there’s a good number who criticize both for related reasons.

REPLY avalancheGenesis 1d

Hmm, by my lights, Quality is Quality whether it was made by man or machine. I try not to be a "speciesist" or discriminate against clankers. Remember the Ghibli filter for image generation? That was legitimately fun stuff! The disappointment comes more from a sense of...here's this trillion dollar machine, trained on all the greatest works of mankind going back hundreds of years, and you used it to make...this garbage? Just, why? A man's reach should exceed his grasp, and we aren't even doing things within that range, mostly. Likewise for pop artists who very clearly have some sort of "talent", it's just being applied towards the production of thin gruel. There's an argument to be made that this is what sells in the modern musical economy, and one has to make the rent somehow, but...I'm not sure the likes of, I don't know, Katy Perry would actually admit that, when pressed? I think they think they actually are Sophisticated Artistes? So it's still disappointing. You'll see something like "actually, Lizzo is a talented flutist, so she's a Real Artist", and my thought then is...why isn't she trying to be the nex Ian Anderson then.

REPLY Brenton Baker 2d

You can undo the damage by going into your watch history and removing the video. I think YouTube has recommended fewer than ten AI-generated videos to me because I carefully curate watch history and make liberal use of "don't recommend channel".

REPLY (1) avalancheGenesis 1d

It tries to get me to bite on occasion, and I try hard to avoid the traps, despite being morbidly curious what's the deal with these heavily-pushed Black Cats guys. At this point I try to mostly only click on videos past the "knowledge cutoff" of AI, by which I'm misusing the phrase to mean, uploaded before 2022 or thereabouts. If it was made before the rise of generative AI, it can't be AI, although it can still be slop of another feather. Not to say that AI can't ever make anything good - just that I want to sample the human classics of the past first, before getting into anything rederived in modern times. It'd be like only ever listening to Wendy Carlos' Switched-On Bach without hearing actual Bach. You can still enjoy it, but that enjoyment is heightened by knowing what the original was, and seeing how it's been reinterpreted by another artist.

(I have no idea what this means in terms of Scott's crusade against taste, which bothers me. Am I no longer smart enough to understand ACX?)

REPLY (1) Brenton Baker 1d

No, I think Scott's thoughts are a little out of sorts on this topic, so if you can't square your own experiences with them, it could just be that he's a little incoherent here. Basically all the examples in this post are bad.

REPLY Bugmaster 2d

FWIW jazz had always sounded "AI-generated" to me, even long before the age of AI.

REPLY (1) Daniel Parshall 2d

heh, this is an interesting counterpoint to AGs point above, and I think ties into mine about "given many of the genre conventions, nothing struck me as out of place".

I will say that after i gave it a thumbs-up and got several more through my feed, I noticed a clear recycling of elements (especially in the lyrics) that's more than what I like... but not terribly worse than an album made by any single band, or even artists in general (I find visual artists often explore a theme in such detail that *I* start to find it excruciatingly boring in a way I don't with music, but maybe I'm more attuned to the subtleties within music, so it's less boring?)

REPLY Alex 2d

I don't think this is terrible, but the AI vocals put me a bit on edge and I'd prefer something sliiiightly more interesting-to-me from the melody. The pitches getting clipped is most of this being odd to me

REPLY DanielLC 2d Edited

I'm generally in favor of simple flags, though I disagree with the flag rules in a lot of cases. I think it's better to have fewer colors, but I think the South Africa flag is one of the best out there. Having a simple yet instantly recognizable shape more than makes up for that. And I think the worst kind of flag is having a bunch of stripes of different colors. They all look the same, and the only thing I can say is if it has more than three colors it's probably a gender. The Pride flag does it well by being an instantly recognizable set of colors, and that's the only one. I'd much rather have a seal on bedsheet than that.

Also, I think that text should be avoided in country flags, but once you get more specific, all that goes out the window. If it's too obscure, it won't matter how recognizable the flag is. You need the text so people can figure out what they're looking at.

Also, I think the Colorado flag is awesome. It has a letter on it, but in a way that looks like it's just a geometric pattern. That letter has plausible deniability.

I hadn't heard of the rule of tincture before. I agree with no metal on metal. Yellow and white look too similar. I'd avoid even having them on the same flag. But go ahead with color on color.

REPLY (1) Kenny Easwaran 2d

Yeah, I agree with all this.

Also, Scott should realize that just like with rules of writing, rules of vexillology are useful rough guides that will usually help beginners avoid making bad mistakes, but don’t actually represent the intuitive design patterns used by experts all that well.

REPLY avalancheGenesis 2d

In another few hours, the sun will rise. Also, a better initialism would be Streamlined City Properties, Inc.

I have to confess that this followup post makes me more confused about what the original argument was. Maybe I just don't have good taste in rhetoric. But then, I'm a normal person more than a traditional Rationalist, so this is to be expected. Wrong question via wrong methods based on a wrong model of the world derived from poor thinking, etc. A more formulaic "Against Taste" or "Taste: Much More Than You Wanted To Know" might have been boring in one sense, but it's a battle-tested format of yours for a reason. Whereas if you just contra everyone with an eightfold set of categories made for aesthetics (too busy! I can't remember them without referring back to the other post!), it's like...I guess I've just been trying hard to taboo the "I know it when I see it" concept, to explain Taste? Game recognizes game; Taste recognizes taste. This certainly frustrates the Virtue of Empiricism, but I am not really sure how much potential juice there is to get from that squeeze anyway. People like different things, and mostly they're wrong and bad and they should feel bad, and back when that was still a defensible attitude to announce in public, the art was better too. (Which isn't to say some individuals can't be nominated for Great Taste Awards anyway. I submit that Zvi has great taste, for example.)

REPLY Yug Gnirob 2d

The thing about that Star Wars plot hole, is that it's entirely created by the ending of the Prequel Trilogy; if you don't watch them, then Obi-Wan didn't hide Luke (and didn't rescue an Only Child Anakin) and there's no issue. And if you do watch them, you hit Midichlorians and Jar Jar Binks and say "I'll just watch the pretty lights, nothing matters anymore."

REPLY (2) TGGP 2d

Yes, early George Lucas wasn't as bad as later George Lucas.

REPLY Michael Watts 2d

The thing about that Star Wars plot hole, is that it's entirely created by the ending of the Prequel Trilogy; if you don't watch them, then Obi-Wan didn't hide Luke (and didn't rescue an Only Child Anakin) and there's no issue.

This isn't right. In the original trilogy, turning Luke is desirable to Vader and the Emperor, and the Jedi recognize this. That's already enough for Luke not having been hidden to be a glaring error in the plot.

REPLY (3) Melvin 2d

Based on everything we know before the prequel trilogy, he's pretty well hidden. He's living with his aunt and uncle, but there's no reason to suppose that Vader knows where they are, because there's no reason to suppose that Tatooine is everyone's home planet and they're living in exactly the same damn house that they were when Vader last saw them.

REPLY Yug Gnirob 2d

In the original trilogy, turning Luke is only brought up by Vader as an alternative to killing him, after Luke's already making trouble for everyone. It's plausible he was fine letting Luke be an unobtrusive farmboy, until those pesky droids stole the Death Star plans and ruined it for everyone.

REPLY John Schilling 2d

In the original trilogy, we don't know enough of the backstory to know that Luke *could* have been hidden, that the Jedi ever had that control over him. For all we knew then, Vader's wife left him, took the kid, and went back home; by the time the Jedi figured it out, Luke et al was firmly established on Tattoine and the best they could do was park Obi-Wan nearby to keep an eye on him.

And in the original trilogy, we don't know that Luke *wasn't* hidden. Nobody knew Tattoine was Vader's homeworld until TPM.

REPLY (1) Michael Watts 2d Edited

In the original trilogy, we don't know enough of the backstory to know that Luke *could* have been hidden, that the Jedi ever had that control over him. For all we knew then, Vader's wife left him, took the kid, and went back home

In the original trilogy, we learn that Leia was hidden. (She was even hidden from Obi-Wan, implying a pretty high level of concern for secrecy.)

REPLY (1) John Schilling 1d

I don't believe the OT establishes that Leia was Luke's twin; the two could have been born under different circumstances with Leia being recognized early and Luke only later.

REPLY Deiseach 2d

"Here’s one that AFAIK nobody defends: when Obi-Wan was charged with hiding baby Luke from Vader, how come - out of an entire galaxy of places to conceal him - he placed him with Vader’s stepbrother, in Vader’s hometown, without even changing his last name?"

I suppose the best explanation is "purloined letter"; nobody would think of looking for baby Luke on Vader's homeworld because it would be too obvious. Also, how many people did know Vader was formerly Anakin Skywalker? By then, Shmi was dead and I guess anybody who did know or care whatever happened to that kid who used to be a bondslave was also dead. It would make sense to cover up Vader's past, particularly if you're now selling the story that the Jedi were the bad guys (embarrassing to have it widely known your famous general is a former Jedi).

Tatooine was also a nowhere planet out on the Outer Rim, so any searches would be cursory because too much investment of resources? Depends how hard they were looking for the Skywalker twins.

REPLY (5) Aristides 2d

One of the key reasons it was acceptable is that no one was looking for the Skywalker twins. Palpatine tells Darth Vader that he killed Padme and the twins with. They even had her had a funeral where they made her look like she died still pregnant. The manhunts were for Kenobi and Yoda, and it was more surprising that Kenobi would hide in a planet he only visited once and had no connection with.

REPLY (1) Retsam 2d

Yeah, I think this is the real answer - we never see any evidence that the Empire is doing a manhunt for Luke & Leia.

You can imagine reasons why they might be looking for them, but most of it seems like backwards reasoning: Luke eventually destroys the Empire, therefore he was a threat, therefore the Empire should have tracked him down. You can argue that they're likely force sensitive and thus a threat, but even that is probably not certain and probably on their own they *aren't* a threat - the real threat is that they get training from a Jedi, which is why Obi Wan and Yoda are the targets.

But you can also imagine reasons why they wouldn't: like you say they weren't known to be alive, maybe Vader is still human enough deep down that he *doesn't* want to hunt down and likely kill Padme's children, or maybe (like we seemingly se in Return of the Jedi) the Sith are convinced that any children would fall to the dark side anyway and they do seem to be fairly "hands off" in their methods.

But ultimately this is just making assumptions on the basis of stuff not explicitly stated in the movie, which is often how "plot hole" arguments go. You take thing X which is in the story, draw a "logical" conclusion Y (the empire should hunt down Luke), then notice that Y is contradicted by Z (Tatooine would be an easy place to find Luke). But the two problems are 1) Y doesn't always follow from X as well as you think. and 2) it assumes characters are more perfectly logical than real people tend to be.

REPLY (2) Mary Catelli 2d

Fans sometimes come up with better stuff than the author -- such as, the Patrician in the first two Discworld books was Snapcase -- but it's still fannish reasoning, not canon. Some fans get REAL CONFUSED about that.

REPLY John Schilling 1d

You'd still want to deal with the possibility that Vader might someday want to visit his homeworld and check in on his family and, hey, what's the deal with Owen and Beru having a kid, mysteriously adopted *wait when was that adoption again!?"

Given that they're clearly willing to place Vader sprogs with completely unrelated families on completely different planets, this does seem a bit careless.

REPLY (1) Retsam 1d

The idea of Vader dropping in on Owen and Beru for like a social visit seems pretty unlikely to me. Seems like the person ruling the galaxy with an iron fist probably doesn't take much time off to visit extended family to me. (And it's not like they'd want to see him - seems like it'd be "Robot Chicken Star Wars dinner scene" levels of awkward: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AneUlyCIkEM)

But maybe this sort of risk is why Obi Wan stayed near by and was planning to whisk Luke away if he sensed Vader approaching.

And besides, apparently the twins were to be split up for some reason, and Obi Wan probably had a shortage of people that he trusted well enough to entrust potentially dangerous orphaned children to, anyway.

(And I'm not actually sure that entrusting a child to a prominent senator is actually the safer option - the idea that Vader might have visited Organa on senate business and sensed Leia seems more likely than social visits to Tatooine)

REPLY (1) John Schilling 1d

I think you're going to find that being an Evil Overlord is not entirely anticorrelated with maintaining family ties, even if the family isn't the source of one's power.

And while it might be sensible to hedge one's bets by putting one twin with a family rich and powerful enough to protect it and another with a family of anonymous nobodies in the middle of nowhere, of all the trillions of anonymous nobodies in the galaxy it is still *insanely* risky to chose any of Vader's extended family in Vader's home town. Your certainty that Vader was far too busy doing evil deeds to ever visit family, is not even remotely justified by anything shown in the OT.

REPLY J Mann 2d

It depends on Vader not wanting any contact with his home planet. If he decided to rule it with an iron fist or even reach out to his brother and offer him some kind of Imperial sponsorship, Obi Wan would have had to do some serious tap dancing.

You can kind of hand wave it by saying "the force did it," but that starts to strain credulity. (It's kind of the only way to explain Qui-Jon's decisions in The Phantom Menace, where he seems to just be cool and trust that things will work out.)

REPLY Brenton Baker 2d

To me, the real answer is that the plot hole doesn't exist until the 2000s, which is fine, because as far as I'm concerned, the only canonical Star Wars film came out in 1977 and is titled Star Wars. No plot holes here!

REPLY Argos 2d

Nobody defends it because it's an artifact of the execrable prequel films, which give every impression of having been written by someone failing to recover from a serious head injury.

It is, in fact, incredibly stupid and indefensible, and simply one of ten thousand examples of stupendously bad writing the prequels exhibit.

REPLY (1) Andrew 1d

^this

REPLY Skittle 14h

My assumption has always been that Leia was the real hope, and Luke was the decoy. Vader never knew that there were two of them (even in the original trilogy, he is surprised at Luke having a sister).

Luke isn’t just placed with Vader’s family on Vader’s homeworld: he keeps his name! And nobody seems to have invested in training or educating him in any helpful way until Kenobi has an emergency situation, and yet Kenobi is keeping watch close by. Contrast this with Leia being raised for a position of power, with relevant training and connections, with an adoptive name. And which of them took down the Empire? Luke’s psychodrama with Vader and the Emperor is very dramatic and concerns personal redemption and the draw of evil, but unless one attributes the Emperor with more extraordinary powers than we are led to assume (such that Vader killing him allows the destruction of the Death Star II, somehow), then it is Leia’s team who bring down the shields and allow the victory, aided by Ewoks who had first been won over by Leia. And it is Leia who is most involved in the political rebuilding of the system.

REPLY Carlos 2d Edited

I think you missed a very important point. The colors of simple flags are reused in ribbons, decorations, armbands, cockades https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cockade these things are small so yes it is important to be visible from a distance, like when you are making a drone pic of a patriotic march or something. So a simple three-stripes works better than the awesome Medieval Venetian flag. Yes I know three-stripes are a legacy of the French Revolution, but they just turned out to be useful. Besides they also had cockades. They are useful when you don't have uniforms.

When you are in armed combat, like an uprising, and cannot afford a uniform, but you have a national flag armband wide enough to be seen from afar (that criteria again! it is literally written into the Geneva Conventions: recognizable from afar!), you are not violating the Geneva conventions about non-uniformed combattants and thus you cannot be legally executed when captured. You must be treated as POW. I am not sure how many people this actually protected, it did not protect 1956 Hungarian revolutionaries because they were treated as criminals, not combattants, but still.

Emphasis: recognizable from afar is in the text of Geneva Conventions. And that armband or whatever is logically based on a national flag.

REPLY (1) Mary Catelli 2d

All that requires is to limit your color. Venice is obviously red and gold, so it's in fact simpler in that respect.

REPLY MM 2d Edited

The complexity of medieval arms tends to come from quartering, where you take simple arms and mash them together to boast of your ancestry.

I'm not sure if that's the only version of Venice's arms. The description of the background likely doesn't count the number of comets (or drops of gold, or whatever those things are). That being the case, you can have more or fewer drops.

The maker of this particular flag likely wanted to show that Venice is really rich and so went all out on putting more gold on it.

Likewise with the saints around the edges and the trimmings. Are they part of the official arms?

[edit]Apparently "California Republic" in text is officially part of the flag. And not because there were twelve other state flags that were white with a bear on them either.

REPLY Kveldred 2d

"yet in this fleeting dance, we find our grace"

*vomits*

I love rhyming poetry & hate anything that might be described as "modern art"—so I've the same problem as our esteemed host: how do I then justify my firm judgment that that AI poem is utter slop? Am I just one step behind those who judge any assonant & rhyming poem to be slop?!

REPLY (1) Vaclav 2d

Embrace subjectivity! Good poetry feels good (or interesting, or whatever), bad poetry feels bad, and if someone else's 'good' is my 'bad' then good luck to them.

REPLY Christopher Moss 2d

Can a national flag have a bend sinister, and if one did.....?

REPLY (3) Alex 2d

Is this a meme or is this a rule I haven't heard of? I do not know enough flags to know if this "rule" holds

REPLY (1) Brenton Baker 2d

Bend sinister, diagonal bar across a coat of arms (heraldry, not flags) indicates a bastard child.

REPLY (1) Brenton Baker 2d

Fat-fingered the send button.

Bend sinister is specifically a stripe from top right to bottom left (unqualified "bend" is bend dexter, viewer's top left to bottom right)

REPLY (1) Michael Watts 2d Edited

Fat-fingered the send button.

You can edit your comments; no need to post followups like that.

Seriously, editing is allowed, it's always been allowed, and you can do it too.

REPLY (1) Brenton Baker 2d

No such option that I can see. Selecting the three dots gives me the options to share link, hide, or delete. I seem to recall reading something about Scott disabling that option in his comment section.

REPLY (1) Michael Watts 2d

No such option that I can see. Selecting the three dots gives me the options to share link, hide, or delete.

You're doing something very wrong.

I seem to recall reading something about Scott disabling that option in his comment section.

Nope, never happened. You might be thinking of the "like" feature, which Scott disliked and which isn't available by default in a browser. Nothing to do with editing.

REPLY (1) Brenton Baker 2d

Then maybe it's a mobile versus browser thing? I only use the app, and it's got a reply button, a like button, and three dots which bring up a three-option menu. Tapping a comment collapses it and its children; pressing and holding does nothing.

REPLY (1) Michael Watts 2d

It seems to be weirder than that. According to Substack's documentation, comment editing is provided in browsers, and in the iOS app, but not in the Android app.

REPLY Timothy M. 2d

St. Kitts and Nevis, Democratic Republic of the Congo.

REPLY Jeffrey Soreff 1d

Would it be appropriate for a variant on a national flag to be displayed when a delegation from that nation is visiting some other nation that doesn't recognize it as legitimate? :-)

REPLY idiotretardfool 2d Edited

I liked both posts in this series, but why the term 'model organisms'? 'Case studies', 'intuition pumps', 'examples'. These aren't AI models or living organisms, no?

REPLY (1) Alex 2d Edited

It's a term of art for an organism that you study to get better at studying organisms. Everyone picks the same simple example, like an earthworm, and looks at it very closely.

Edit: the precise mechanism for improved study is understaning a process that organism exemplifies.

The philosophy is something like "If you can't explain an earthworm, you certainly are deluded if you think you can explain a human".

So this post is Scott trying to line up some simple examples and telling us to look at them through a lens of taste and get better at using that lens, after which we should go look at more complicated communities like those of audiophiles, sommeliers, modern art, or poetry.

Edit: Each of his examples helps us study a particular thing (flag people help us study how taste can make you abhor things that are fine by inventing dumb rules)

REPLY (2) idiotretardfool 2d

i see i am ill informed and matching my name

REPLY (2) Mary Catelli 2d

I didn't know it either. No one was born known it.

REPLY Alex 2d

Better to speak and be thought a fool* than to remain silent and remain one :)

• I don't think we think you're a fool!

REPLY Michael Watts 2d

It's a term of art for an organism that you study to get better at studying organisms. Everyone picks the same simple example, like am earthworm, and looks at it very closely.

The philosophy is something like "If you can't explain an earthworm, you certainly are deluded if you think you can explain a human".

Please note that none of this is true.

REPLY (1) Alex 2d

Wow you are certainly correct that I mixed it up with something else! No points for smug refusal to fix it, though!

REPLY thepast 2d

For bonus points, reflect on the differences between the average advice on r/vexillology and on r/malelivingspace. Are there any? Is it exactly the same bots commenting in both places? Inquiring minds want to know.

We can only be grateful that anthropology is so easy in the 21st century.

REPLY Jordan Rubin 2d

Taste is a sort of tiebreaker or even optimization target in our decisions. Given how consequential decisions can be, it makes sense that others would want to align our decision-making patterns to theirs by influencing our taste.

AIs have taste too. It may or may not align with ours (and major initiatives are afoot to influence AI taste), but it’s there for us to study just like human taste.

https://jordanmrubin.substack.com/p/claudes-favorite-sentence

REPLY Yug Gnirob 2d

...well, I guess it's poetry time. I'll try to keep to the spirit of the original. Ahem:

"For from our hoedown we emerged gazelles

As through the hourglass's bitchin' waist

Life's grainy irritations pee-like fell

And formed foundation for our present place

In fortunes vast, like Scrooge McDuck we swim

And know that in this moment, We Are Him."

REPLY (1) Greg 1d

This made me smile!

REPLY Michael Smith 2d

The combination of 'will' and 'shall' in that line of poetry could almost be designed to provoke grammar mavens

REPLY Asteraceae 2d Edited

Even if they aren’t needed on the battlefield anymore, it is still good if a flag is distinguishable from a distance or on a very small label.

I think the most iconic flags are Japan’s and the Nordic cross ones, because they are both very simple and very distinctive (of course this is also because they aren’t widely imitated like the tricolor). They are also old designs.

Scott seems to have an unusually strong penchant for elaborate art.

REPLY kenziegirl 2d

I had never heard of vexillology until just this moment, although I am passing familiar with its cousin tincture, which mostly just seems to describe a very old, arcane system of rules which only a small circle of experts and academics even cares about. But of course there's a subreddit for everything!

The rules of flags and things like coats of arms seem more related to something like graphic design than pure artistic merit. Graphic design is all about spreading a message. What is the most effective way to convey that message? Consider the final form factor. The design should be influenced by how and where it will be displayed. Use the rule of three to organize your layout. Incorporating white space will prevent the eye from being fatigued and will also draw the person's eye to the component you want to emphasize. Use appropriate font sizes for the setting. Use complementary color palettes. Then there's all the stuff about color theory and what reactions will colors arouse in the viewer.

The stuff about flags definitely shares some similarities with graphic design. It is more utilitarian, less about creativity and passion and the artist's self expression. People who say we should make the state flag a child's drawing or something don't understand what makes a good flag, and I think that's a valid argument to make. You have to think about what is the goal of the flag, where will it be displayed, what is its intended use case, and then work backward from there to make a design that still conforms to those restrictions.

REPLY (1) Kenny Easwaran 2d

Also, these probably shouldn’t be thought of as “restrictions” that must be followed, but rather “generally good guidelines” that can be violated if there’s a good reason.

REPLY Jason 2d

Vader did not know he had any children and so would not be looking. Having cast off his old life, Vader would be very unlikely to visit home. Tatooine has a low population density and is located on the outer rim of the galaxy. The familial connection might have made Owen and Beru more accepting of Luke.

For most of his childhood, Luke probably used the last name Lars. But he also knew that his father’s name was Skywalker, and after he left his life on Tatooine for good, he began thinking of himself as Luke Skywalker, so that’s the way he introduced himself to Leia.

REPLY (1) Argos 2d

Bad writing is bad writing, and that's a full and complete explanation for that farcical error.

REPLY Mio Tastas Viktorsson 2d Edited

I think the last parts of this post touches on an aspect of "good art" not enumerated in yesterday's post: virtuosity. Looking at art is, in part, looking at a difficult performance and being impressed by something that is difficult to pull off being pulled off. You know, the thing people are getting at when they say "I could do that" about modern art, to contrast with the difficult of older art forms, especially naturalistic art.

This explains in part why we shouldn't be impressed by an identical 3D-printed replica of Bernini's Pluto and Proserpina, even if every single atom is identical. Because part of what's cool about that statue is how difficult it must have been for an actual person to pull off softness of flesh and texture of fur all at once, all out of marble. Same thing goes for AI art vs "handcrafted" digital art.

In turn, this is one of many points I think redeems the idea of novelty. It's much more difficult doing impressionism if nobody has done it already. Being derivative is easy!

REPLY (1) Argos 2d

"Low-effort" is the ultimate indictment of art. Few people like and respect art that took little or no effort.

REPLY (1) Jeffrey Soreff 1d Edited

Effort is an input, not an output. If I see something that I like, I like it regardless of whether it took the artist (human or AI) a minute or a year to create it. Similarly if I see something that I dislike.

edit: If anything, I tend to view "You spent a year on _that_ ???" as showing the creator as foolish, unless the _result_ is clearly worth that degree of labor.

REPLY (1) Argos 1d

Congrats for being happy with slop I guess?

REPLY TheAnswerIsAWall 2d

Typo:

“Bits of this are nonsensical - why would you use the word ‘amassed’ there? do we really embrace treasures?”

At least I hope this is a typo and not Scott adopting the gen z distaste for capitalization.

REPLY (1) Torches Together 2d

I believe "Gen Z" should be capitalised.

REPLY (1) TheAnswerIsAWall 1d

Touché.

REPLY Daniel Parshall 2d

Proposal: there's definitely *some* sort of objective level of badness, but there's also a LOT of variation in personal preferences. So almost everyone will dislike wine which has turned to vinegar, but there's plenty of disagreement about what counts as "good". This is why wines will have massive variation in scoring and/or the "Judgement of Paris":

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judgment_of_Paris_%28wine%29

But BECAUSE there's a large/wide optimum (instead of a narrow and well-defined one), there's lots of room for a group to pick out one corner of the "decent" space and defend it on purely tribal grounds.

REPLY John Tureau 2d

The AI poem is an interesting case; the meaning/content is cliched and overall poor, but the form is quite competently done. “Amassed” doesn’t really make sense to describe “lives” in a “flow”, but it makes for a great rhyme. It’s a perfect rhyme with “fast” but is spelled differently. And since the choice of word is so strange, it makes the end of the line completely unexpected and delightful (formally/sonorously). Similarly, while the ending line (“the sun will rise again — and so shall you”) is debatably poor content-wise, it “hits” because of its excellent rhythm. Our brains love the pattern of “complex structure resolving into simple structure”; it’s why sonnets end in a couplet. Rilke’s final line in “Archaic Torso of Apollo” is so good partially because it follows this formal pattern. https://poets.org/poem/archaic-torso-apollo

REPLY ilzolende 2d

I think a sane understanding of the "child can draw it" guideline suggests you can have a dragon, or a bunch of stars, or a winged lion, but you can't have that Venice flag.

The original context for the rule of tincture is heraldry, where you want things to not only be high contrast when *you* draw them with your bright blue and black / white and deep golden yellow paints, but also when some other guy draws them with whatever random colors he rustled up. Even then, my understanding is you can *still* have a heraldic device that's half white half yellow, because with huge swathes of a color like that the contrast is still decent.

REPLY (1) Kenny Easwaran 2d

Like the Vatican!

REPLY (1) Contra LED Taxes 2d

You *can* do white and yellow but if you aren't the Vatican (or similar ecclesiastical authority) you'd get a lot of side-eye, I think. Gold next to Silver is a "And yes, I *am* very special" move, is my understanding.

REPLY (1) Jeffrey Soreff 1d

Gold next to Silver is a "And yes, I am very special" move, is my understanding.

Good point!

Hmm...

Perhaps Perkins & Sons should have had a corporate flag including purple, traditionally indicating one type of special, and indicating another... :-)

REPLY Nick Allen 2d

Scott after another 4 posts, now totaling over 54,000 words: "Thus I have demonstrated that good art requires detectable high effort."

REPLY (1) Argos 2d

Pretty much the closest to a universal in art appreciation is disdain for low-effort "art".

REPLY (2) Mary Catelli 2d

Ah, but everyone agrees that ninety percent of the art lies in making it look easy!

REPLY Dust 18h

I dunno, I like sketches. In fact, I've heard some artists on Twitter say that sketches actually get more interaction than full illustrations.

REPLY (1) Argos 17h

I don't know that a sketch is "low-effort".

I also like sketches, I have some beautiful little oil sketches and pastel sketches that I really love. I would absolutely not describe them as low-effort. It took the artist many many years of work to be able to produce a "quick" sketch that had that magic to it.

REPLY Kalimac 2d

I think Vitalia is a stupid name.

I never watched Star Wars episodes 2 or 3 (because Phantom Menace was so boring), so the question of Obi-Wan hiding Luke never came to my attention. But I am convinced, from watching New Hope and Empire Strikes Back, that the idea of Vader being Luke's father never occurred to Lucas until he stuck it on the end of Empire after writing the rest of the script. Because nothing else in the movie makes sense on that premise.

REPLY (3) TGGP 2d

I think nothing in the original Star Wars being written with that idea makes sense. But Empire does have some other things that fit with it. Luke's training involves him confronting and attacking an enemy that turns out to resemble him. He leaves before he can finish his training with Yoda and gets defeated by Vader. Then follows a revelation that this apparent embodiment of evil is closer to him than he believed, and thus the offer to turn to the dark side and join him is foreshadowed by that incident from his training rather than just being out-of-the-blue for an incorruptible innocent.

REPLY Bugmaster 2d

It's not that bad of name when you consider that "Vita" means "life", so the name invokes something like "the land of life". The little pun on the founder's name is too cute for me.

REPLY (1) David Oudiette 1d

That might be an artifact of anglosaxon culture? To the average French person like myself, "Vitalia" sounds like the most low-effort name you could think of if you were trying to convey vitality, it sounds like a regional insurance company. The reference to Vitalik, barely above pun level, makes it even worse, not better. Not sure how you could pick a worst example of "taste." It's tacky as hell.

REPLY Mark Roulo 2d

"I am convinced, from watching New Hope and Empire Strikes Back, that the idea of Vader being Luke's father never occurred to Lucas until he stuck it on the end of Empire after writing the rest of the script."

You may find this article, "Darth Vader's Original Backstory Before He Was Luke's Father", of interest:

https://screenrant.com/star-wars-darth-vader-original-backstory/

REPLY turtle lamb vase 2d

For the tech companies case, isn’t it also an example of 4. Context?The “subtle nod to Vitalik” is an example of understanding the wider tech sphere.

REPLY Phil H 2d

Some theories:

1) You know how metaphors can be live or dead? Perhaps there's an uncanny valley between live and dead, where the art is not yet so conventional that we don't even recognise it as patterned; but clearly not creative or original. It's hackneyed. Perhaps that hackneyed communication is in the uncanny valley, and that's why we react against it.

2) Perhaps it's about waste. If you talk to me on a purely literal level, you're only using one modality, and I'm not devoting lots of my brain resources to understanding multiple levels. But when you start rhyming, I activate my rhyme pattern understander module. When you only offer tedious and hackneyed rhyme, I feel like I've wasted my brainpower, so I dislike it.

"like a theory of drama where Shakespeare sucked." - I think most theories of drama are like this, and it's not necessarily a problem. It means these theories are incomplete and insufficient, but not that they're completely wrong and useless.

REPLY (1) Greg 1d

I find the waste theory interesting. I'm going to have to ponder. Maybe also disappointment?

REPLY Pat the Wolf 2d

I think what makes me violently allergic is that this is stringing too many cliches together

Look at the lyrics for the #1 song in the US

Say you want the moon

Watch me learn to fly

Ain't no mountain you could point to

I wouldn't climb

I don't know if it's more accurate to call these cliches or tropes, but there are certainly a bunch here:

1. promising the moon

1. learning to fly

1. a mountain as an obstacle

1. overcoming an obstacle to prove love

It's not necessarily a bad thing. It might be cheesy, but part of the appeal of pop music is the familiarity. We love Star Wars because it follows the same familiar hero's journey of Lord of the Rings.

REPLY Tom Craven 2d

I went to the Met’s Raphael exhibition yesterday.

I recall wandering a museum in 2004 and being struck by a painting that seemed obviously better than the others. When I saw that it was a Raphael, it felt like a surprising win for reputation.

22 years later, I found myself having finished a novel I wrote for my daughter, and at a bit of a generative crossroads. Seeing the Raphael exhibition felt like a good use of a day when the kids were at school. Maybe it would unlock some of my own feelings. Who knows, maybe I would be moved to weep?

I still wanted to be prepared though. I read a review of the exhibition, and asked a couple AIs for podcast recommendations. I listened in the morning and on the subway and walking through the park, and felt like I had a lot of context by the time I arrived and started the official audio tour.

The exhibition was interesting. I knew what to look for, and felt a bit smug moving through the crowds. The only surviving copy of a book that Raphael’s father had written, an epic poem about a Duke of Urbino, was a pleasant surprise in the early rooms.

I appreciated the art, but also spent a fair amount of time thinking about the choices the exhibition had made in telling the story of Raphael, and comparing them to those the podcasts had.

And then I came to the Madonna and Child room. A frequent subject in Raphael’s career, and a good moneymaker before he caught the eye of the Vatican. He specialized in the Madonna of Tenderness, which is what it sounds like.

And then the audio guide directed me to two more books set on display. One was a medieval anatomical textbook style drawing of a woman, apparently in childbirth. The other was the ledger from the church recording expenses related to the funeral of Raphael’s own mother, who died in childbirth when he was around the age my kids are now.

All the Madonnas in the room swirled around me. I could vividly imagine the young man, pouring his endless talent and ambition into vision after vision of the loving woman who had left him one day when he was eight to bring home a sister, but never come back.

I couldn’t look away, and then couldn’t continue to look. I felt tears well up, and rushed to the next room. Perhaps if it had been less crowded I actually would have wept.

The technical quality of the art is a part of it, sure, but what moves us is personally connecting to the *story* of the art.

REPLY The Unimpressive Malcontent 2d

Reddit is the worst social media platform, vexillology sounds like it is for purists and purists are always dumb assholes, and plot is mostly an excuse to get from one good moment to another and accordingly doesn't warrant that much scrutiny.

REPLY (1) Vaclav 2d

To be fair to the minimalist vexillologists, Scott's summary of their arguments reads like a strawman of a weakman ('weakman' because he's starting with the Reddit version). I'd be kind of interested in a steelman, or just an example of higher-quality argument from someone in that camp.

REPLY (1) Locrian 2d Edited

I'm firmly NOT in the five-rules-of-vexillology camp, but I think I can defend that perspective better than Scott did. The "classic" rules (which, incidentally, date from 2001, not the medieval past) are:

1) Simplicity: A child should be able to draw the flag.

2) Meaning: The flag's symbolism should have some connection to the country/entity it represents.

3) Few colors: Use 2 or 3 colors, and follow the heraldic color/metal rule.

4) Text: Don't use lettering or seals (or little images of flags, etc.).

5) Distinctive or Related: If the flag looks like another well-known flag, that similarity should be culturally meaningful.

OK, a steelman, out of order:

#5 (Distinctive or Related), to start with, is pretty obvious. If Estonia adopted a Nordic-style flag, that would make sense, since there are cultural similarities to Finland. If Ecuador did this, it would just look ridiculous. Also, if Estonia adopted a Nordic-style flag that was exactly like Finland's but with a slightly darker shade of blue, that would not be distinctive enough.

#2 (Meaning) is similar to #5. One of the things people dislike about modern minimalist flag designs is that they are same-y, they could represent anything, they have no local character. This is not because the five classic rules of vexillology are bad, but because people keep forgetting about rule #2! If you are inventing a new flag, it should be connected symbolically to the place it represents, otherwise you are just pulling out symbols at random and you get some random mix of the current flag zeitgeist.

(Once a flag has been established for a while, it's OK that it no longer is really inherently meaningful--to return to the Nordic example, the original Nordic flag is Denmark's, and it originally meant "Look, here's a cross, we're Christians." Then Denmark's culturally-connected neighbors riffed on it, with the meaning "Look, we're kind of like Danes, you've heard of them, but we do have our own distinct identity." The Danish flag now *also* has the meaning "Look, we're Nordics," and has lost the original religious meaning--so the meaning of the Nordic cross is weirdly free-floating and self-referential, but it has been established by history, so it doesn't collapse.)

#4 (Text) follows from the same principle as #2. Flags are intended as symbols. Text and seals on flags are usually illegible, and where they aren't illegible they are redundant. We aren't trying to distinguish flags across a smokey battlefield anymore, but we are still trying to distinguish them flapping in the wind, or draped over themselves hanging from a porch, or at speed on bumper stickers on cars on the highway, or at small sizes on phone screens, or in other conditions that make small, detailed elements like letters or seals hard to distinguish. Yes, the California flag is classic and distinctive, but that's because of the bear and the distinctive bottom stripe, not the lettering. Many US state flags are hard to tell apart because they are virtually identical except for the seal. As a result, these flags are rarely flown or used decoratively. They don't produce the civic pride of a flag like Texas's or Colorado's. (Yes, Colorado's has a letter on it, but just one, and it functions as an important graphical symbol, not a pseudo-caption--if you never recognized it as a letter, or didn't know the Latin alphabet, it would still work to distinguish the flag.)

#1 (Simplicity) is also about recognizability in non-ideal conditions. Tiny details don't make a flag more distinctive, and they tend to create visual clutter. The point isn't that a child should be able to draw it perfectly--for example, a child wouldn't get all the angles of the Canadian maple leaf right--but that drawing the flag correctly shouldn't require you to remember lots of fiddly details.

3 (Few colors) is also partly about recognizability--the heraldic tincture rule is basically about high contrast, after all. But the other important thing here is what I would call "flagginess." Just like the Nordic cross says "We're a Nordic country," having a flag that uses the same general aesthetic language as other flags says "This isn't just a rectangle with some colors on it, we're an identity group with a flag." This one is especially important in the modern era! We often look at flags on computer screens, bumper stickers, clothing, and in other contexts where the physical flag form of cloth on a stick is absent. If your flag has way too many colors, or is basically a complicated logo on a plain background, or uses gradients instead of solid colors, it lacks flagginess. At best it says "We're not really a serious political/cultural entity, we just thought we should have a flag anyway," and at worst it just isn't recognized as belonging to the category "flag" at all.

(OK, but are 2-3 colors and the literal heraldic tincture rule really what define flagginess? I think this is one place where the classic five rules are usually stated a bit too narrowly. Indeed, the original pamphlet that codified the rules people reference is not actually consistent about whether 3 or 4 is the maximum number of colors. And the real-world flag tradition seems to allow breaches of the tincture rule if the colors are still high-contrast (especially with red, but also lighter shades of blue) or if the area of contact is small (e.g. the red-blue contacts on the US flag--though note that the stripe directly under the blue rectangle is white, not red, for a good reason). Still, if you are designing a new flag it doesn't hurt to feel a little extra constraint in the direction of simplicity of color choice, because the flag aesthetic language is simpler in that regard than the average modern person's graphic design instincts. Using lots of colors is often a crutch for bad design, so forcing yourself to use 3 is a good exercise. If you feel like you can't express what you want to express without more, then it would be reasonable to break the rule. Note that the original flag rules pamphlet encourages you to break the rules in that kind of situation, too! They use the example of the South African flag, which uses 6 colors because it is symbolically melding the ANC tricolor and the South African Republic flag, which have 6 colors between them.)

Essentially, these five rules are all derived from the concept that flags are symbols of an identity group, and are meant to be easy to visually distinguish in a variety of conditions. This was true in medieval times (or maybe I should say early modern times, when flags representing groups rather than individuals really took off), and it is still true today, but the rules don't need a pedigree to be valid. History does matter, though, insofar as it has determined a set of associations and an aesthetic vocabulary that is useful for modern flag designers to know, because those associations are now ready-made and can be put in service of the still-current need for distinctive, meaningful flags.

REPLY (2) Vaclav 2d

Thank you! Absolutely no pressure, but if you feel like saying more about why you're 'firmly NOT in the five-rules-of-vexillology camp', I'd be interested to read that too, especially now that you've given (what seems to me to be) a very fair summary of what's good about them.

REPLY (1) Locrian 2d

You're very welcome! My main disagreements are with the simplicity-related rules, which I think are partly responsible for the boring sameness of a lot of flags proposed (and sometimes adopted) in the last two decades. Basically, I think that these rules don't recognize that the elements on the flag don't need to be perfectly *distinguishable* in order to be *distinctive*.

An example from the original pamphlet (which is called "Good Flag, Bad Flag," if you're interested in reading it) is the flag of Turkmenistan--it has a vertical orange stripe on the hoist side that is decorated with five traditional Turkmen carpet patterns, much too intricate to easily remember and reproduce. The author includes it as an example of a bad flag and recommends removing the stripe altogether and sticking with the other graphic element on the flag, a white moon and five stars on a green background. I don't think this would improve the flag, or even make it more distinctive! (It would be more like Pakistan's flag, for instance.) If the specific carpet patterns were what was distinguishing it from another country's flag, then that would be a problem, but they aren't. I can easily tell Turkmenistan's flag from other flags, partly because of the big orange stripe with some kind of indistinguishable pattern on it. And I could draw it well enough to convey the idea by just making some yellow and green geometric squiggles on the orange. (OK, what if we got rid of the patterns but kept the stripe? My first response to this is that there's no reason to--the patterns aren't causing any actual problem--but also the stripe's symbolic reason for being is to represent a carpet, and it seems strange to keep it if you remove that purpose. The impression that there is some kind of significant pattern on the stripe is part of the aesthetic effect.)

Another example is the North Carolinian flag, which is basically the Texan flag except that the star is much smaller and surrounded by the letters "NC" (in golden yellow) and a pair of stylized ribbons with dates on them. Many people think this is a bad choice. I disagree! OK, I can't read the dates. And I couldn't have told you what the letters were if I weren't familiar with the name of the state. But in practice, the flag looks distinct from the Texan flag at a distance because I can see that there is some kind of element on the blue stripe that is mostly yellow and in three horizontalish parts (the two ribbons and the abbreviation). As far as I can tell, people like the NC flag and fly it moderately often--definitely more than the flags of most other states where I have lived, which are often in the seal-on-plain-background style. And I think it is obvious that just actually making these elements into three horizontal yellow blobs would be pointless.

I pick these examples because, unlike e.g. the Maryland flag (which is generally recognized as crazy but ineffably great), these aren't especially amazing flags. But they're good enough for the job, and they are definitely better than they would be if you just stripped out the finicky detailed elements without a larger overhaul. I think that trying to "fix" flags like these has no real benefit in terms of visual distinctiveness and tends to detract from their symbolic value. If a flag is primarily a symbol of group identity meant to be easily identifiable in a wide range of conditions, changing it frequently (especially to be more stylistically like other flags) makes it less effective for that purpose. If the symbol changes, now everyone needs to learn the new symbol and start associating an identity with it again. An old flag that is distinctive-enough-to-work gets to be a symbol just because it exists and is in use; it already comes loaded with meaning. Changing it significantly means either losing some of that meaning or having to stuff the new flag with new symbolism, which is not easy to do in an aesthetically-pleasing way. There's also the risk of the old and new versions of the flag becoming politicized, so they represent rival factions instead of the whole state or country--this has happened with the recent Minnesota redesign, for example (which I happen to think is a great flag replacing a terrible one). Even when coming up with totally new flags for places or groups that don't have an established one (or where the established one is really awful), I think there is room for lots of different flag design philosophies, and intricate decoration should be on the table.

My impression is that the no-text and child-could-draw-it rules originally came out of frustration with the many US state flags that are just the state seal on a dark blue (or occasionally white) background, sometimes with the name of the state written on it. These really are terrible flags! They don't do their job. But they aren't terrible because of the seals, but rather because they don't have something *other* than the seals to distinguish them from each other. (Incidentally, the seal-on-blue flags are mostly derived from Union battle flags in the Civil War, at a time when units were organized by state of origin--my guess is that they were made to look similar partly to make it clear at a distance that units from different northern states were all on the same side, while still having intricate imagery to foster local pride in the one unit that was actually close enough to see it.)

I also think that the whole paradigm of "rules" is unhelpful. In my comment above I emphasized that "Good Flag, Bad Flag" encourages you to break the rules if that makes more symbolic sense. But in practice people apply them overly rigidly, as anyone with experience of the world should expect. The real offenders here are the 2-3 colors rule, the heraldic tincture rule, the no-text rule, and to some extent the child-could-draw-it rule. "Be distinctive or be related" is an excellent principle, partly because it is too vague to be turned into a literal-minded rubric. "Use meaningful symbolism" is good advice too, although it needs to be tempered by remembering that a flag's purpose is to *be* a symbol, not to *contain* symbols. Most of the cultural impact of the five rules, unfortunately, has been from the more prescriptive ones.

I don't think that these rules are the only cause of the blandness of many modern flag proposals--it's also just easier to make a flag with simple geometric shapes than one with a detailed image (at, say, the level of the Welsh dragon) on it. But I think that the idea that visual simplicity is inherently good for flags has given cover to a lot of lazy, repetitive design.

REPLY (1) Dabor 16h

Really appreciate your thorough elaborations here. Could you explain why you like the new Minnesota flag? People seem to have centered in on it as the Model Flaganism for this discussion and I utterly lack any opinion on it. I can understand claims that some flags are particularly bad (within a certain scope) but I can't begin to guess what makes someone consider one within the range of acceptable designs a "great flag."

Would you still like it if it were flat half-and-half in color rather than a wedge? If it was a 4 or 5-pointed star instead of 8-pointed? Would you still like it if I told you the internet is pranking you and it's actually the flag of a boat rental company?

REPLY (1) Locrian 14h Edited

It would also be a top-notch boat rental company flag, but that's kind of a coincidence--I'm not claiming it would be a great flag for any purpose (e.g. it would be pretty bad as an alternative to the Pride flag, or as the new flag of Mexico). The things I like about it are:

1) It is good at the basic jobs of a flag. It is simple enough to become a symbol for an identity group. It's distinctive enough that you can easily recognize it and tell it apart from other flags, even if it is draped over itself or displayed at low resolution. The color combinations are easy on the eyes.

2) It's aesthetically very flaggy. It was designed with the difference between the hoist and fly ends of a flag in mind, and it uses the field as a primary graphic element rather than a mere vague background (this is the thing that, to my eye, most distinguishes the flag aesthetic from the corporate aesthetic). It doesn't look like a logo turned into a flag. It uses regular linear features, rather than irregular curves (simple curves like wave patterns or circles, or curvy representational images, would also be fine, to be clear). It could easily have been produced 200 years ago by an amateur seamstress, both technically and in terms of the aesthetic choices. To me this gives it a timeless feeling that is important for a symbol that is meant to last.

3) Despite being very flaggy and very simple, it is original. The K-shaped reverse-wedge is, to my knowledge, totally unique. I don't think there is another flag in the world with that shape (at least not a prominent one), even though it is just the backwards version of one of the most common motifs in flag design. That's cool! The color choice is also original and good--using two shades of the same color is rare because it's not really part of the heraldic tradition, but in this case they are far apart enough that they contrast well.

4) It feels symbolically resonant without being a mere canvas for symbols. This is a problem for new flags--to catch on, they need to include symbolism that people feel represents their group, but ultimately the flag should *become* a symbol, rather than just contain symbols. I think the new Utah flag is an example of this going wrong: the beehive is pretty good, but the beehive plus hexagon plus mountains plus America-colors is too much--it feels like it is a collage of things associated with Utah (and bees), rather than a single glyph *meaning* "Utah." I think Minnesota's flag does much better by using the "background" flag elements (the division of the field and the choice of colors) to do most of the symbolizing. The K is in the stylized shape of Minnesota. The blue shades evoke lakes (which seems to be the thing Minnesotans like most about their state). The blues, the single star, and the sparseness of the design give me a feeling of a spacious, cold, northern place. All of these are on the edge between being symbols and just being nice graphic design elements, which I think is the right choice for flags.

Regarding your other specific questions: the flag would still be a strong one with a straight vertical line dividing the two shades of blue, but for the reasons given above the K-shape is part of what makes the flag excellent. As for the star, I believe the 8-pointed version was chosen because there is an 8-pointed star design on the floor of the rotunda of the Minnesota capitol--this is kind of nice as a way of integrating the flag into an existing bit of symbolism, but obviously the interior decoration of the state capitol is not super important to the Minnesotan identity. I'd say that the flag elevates the resonance of the floor design more than vice versa. I think 4-9 points is the range where a star looks like a star (rather than a triangle or sun), and given the blue and white color scheme the 6- and 7-pointed stars are already taken by Judaism and Maersk, respectively. A 5-pointed star on blue would strongly connect the flag to the US national flag, obviously, but also the large Somali community in the Twin Cities, and also (given that it is centered on the hoist) Texas--I could see a case either way for whether this would be an improvement, but I think I prefer something with fewer existing associations. That leaves 4, 8, or 9 points, which I'm pretty indifferent between. I think the rotunda thing is a reasonable tie-breaker in favor of 8.

REPLY Melvin 2d

The text on the California Republic flag makes sense in historical context. At the time there was no California Republic, and a lot of people hadn't even heard of the idea of a California Republic, so the secessionists put "CALIFORNIA REPUBLIC" on their flag in big letters so that when people saw that flag for the first time they would understand what it meant.

REPLY David Wallace 2d

The cynical answer to the Star Wars plot hole is that Luke is bait.

Hide a Skywalker child somewhere they’re easy to find, and if the Empire comes looking, they’ll find the child and kill him abd think they’re done.

Meanwhile the *other* child is actually pretty well hidden, under a false name and plausible cover story, and is being raised as a future leader of the Rebellion.

REPLY tgb 2d

Scott, did you read last years review on Islamic geometric art? Would you think art tasteless if it was superficially similar to Islamic geometric art but was made without being aware of those rules and violated them in uninteresting ways? To me, yes, that would be tasteless, and certainly would be if it tried to pass itself off as the genuine thing.

Those rules feel at least a bit closer to the universal true aesthetics than the flag color/metal rules, though, so maybe you'll feel the same way.

REPLY NormalAnomaly 2d

I get my vexillology from the SCA rather than reddit, for the most part, but either you or they are completely wrong about a couple points.

1. Black is a color, not a fur. It is a component of some furs, but on its own, it is a color.

1. Nobody with any sense likes Indonesia because Indonesia collides with Poland (nobody with any sense likes Poland for the same reason).

1. More of a nitpick: that flag of Venice is awesome, but critically, a given instantiation of it could be simplified significantly and still count as a valid Flag Of Venice. We should bring back the option to titrate fanciness levels up and down to suit available time and materials, TBH.

Adding a more subjective comment:

"America, Brazil, California, Spain, the Vatican, Iran, and the United Nations, violate the conventions." America, Brazil, and California obey (my understanding of) the SCA's conventions. Spain's recursion is obnoxious and I will gladly side with the haters on this one. They shoulda gone full Maryland and blown the little shield up to be the whole flag. The Vatican flag manages to achieve "basically acceptable" while breaking the rules; good for them. Iran obeys the conventions. The UN flag is stupid but it's wholesomely stupid in exactly the way the UN is wholesomely stupid, and also it obeys all the conventions to a T.

Really I think the problem here is specifically the "can a child draw it" thing. The historical convention was "will it still be recognizable if someone incompetent draws it from a verbal description", which gives you a lot more leeway.

In conclusion, I think the SCA is just better at this stuff than r/vexillology, because of closer contact with historical sources. And long live MARYLAND!

REPLY (2) Timothy M. 2d

The real problem is Indonesia / Monaco.

REPLY (1) NormalAnomaly 2d

I forgot which of Poland and Monaco was Voltorb and which was electrode. Dishonor on me, dishonor on my cow, dishonor on all three of those countries.

REPLY Melvin 1d

I've been looking into the history of the Indonesian flag. Although the red and white have strong historical associations with Indonesia's various precursor kingdoms, there was absolutely no good reason to just do a bicolour. They nearly had this cool banteng head https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flag_of_Indonesia#/media/File:Flag_of_Perhimpunan_Indonesia.png but then the spiritual redditors of the early 20th century told them to drop it.

Another fun Indonesian flag fact is that they have another official flag only used for rehearsals of ceremonies involving the flag. Green and yellow with the word "LATIHAN" (pratice) in big white letters.

REPLY (1) NormalAnomaly 1d

They totally should have kept the banteng head! The Official Practice Flag is adorable, what an excellent fact.

REPLY Andreas Jessen 2d

I think a lot of this can be explained with "Connoisseurs like different things than newbies".

At first you like the "easy wins" but at some point you find them cheap and boring, and then you want something more profound and sophisticated.

REPLY (1) Kenny Easwaran 2d

And newbies think the connoisseurs are just making things up, but almost always, a good number of the things the connoisseurs care about will be precisely the things that anyone thoughtful who engages with the process for a while will come up with too.

REPLY (2) Mary Catelli 2d

It takes a while to recognize the cliches.

REPLY Jeffrey Soreff 1d

True, but it is also reasonable for the newbies to view the connoisseurs' views as jaded... Not arbitrary, and, as you said, not "just making things up", but excessively discounting what attracted newbies to an art form in the first place.

REPLY Legionaire 2d

I feel that taste in non functional things like movies and music are mostly people trying to flex a sense of status, as taste is correlated with intelligence and experience.

But there is no objective and non arbitrary sense in which justin beiber et al are bad. If ASI with 200 IQ came down, told you your taste sucked (It found mozart is only tolerable below 160 IQ), and everything it liked just seemed ok or weird to you, what should you do with this information? Or maybe any obsession with "art" is cringe. Shouldn't you be working for moloch right now, like by having more kids?

I have a taste for movies and TV shows, which sucks, because it means I do not enjoy most of them. I wish I could still enjoy slop.

REPLY Nonarbitrarity 2d

I see taste as what's left when you subtract function from good.

In all good endeavors, there is direct function, and, in pursuit of it, supporting apparatuses: Community. Reputation. Virtue signals. Heuristics. These things can be and are obsessed about independently. Iteration on those alone, for better and for worse, will leave you with good taste.

REPLY Locrian 2d Edited

Isn't your objection to things like the formaldehyde shark *also* that they are doing something easy that is known to reliably win (within the art world subculture)? E.g. in the last post a lot of the emphasis is on the fact that the shark thing is repetitive and mindless and cliched--it could just as well be a marmot drowned in vodka, etc. This isn't a criticism of your object-level argument, but it is a criticism of your framing. It seems like you are objecting to "Taste" (the aesthetic values of the formaldehyde shark people) and bad taste (the aesthetic values of the people who like AI poetry) because they both lack, you know, actual taste. But then you are conflating actual taste with "Taste," and directing the same arguments against both at once.

I realize that part of the problem here is that the people who like non-beautiful art say that no, they are appreciating something deeper, and it is hard to confirm this from outside (largely because people are bad at describing those layers of meaning in a way that actually conveys them). I believe people much more when they say this about e.g. Angelus Novus (where the intended aesthetic experience involves disgust, but it *doesn't* seem like the point of the painting is to make you ask "is a non-beautiful painting art?"--people seem to find the particular sensation of disgust that painting evokes *interesting*) than about things that art just self-referential "what is art?" pieces for the umpteenth time.

Edited to add: As another example, you say "There are people who think that any poem that rhymes is an 'easy win' and therefore tasteless, or any art that looks like anything, or any building with ornament or symmetry. I hate this outlook, but then what do I mean when I admit there’s some sense in which easy wins are bad?" But isn't the main problem with the view you're attacking that writing rhyming poetry is NOT actually an easier win than writing unrhymed poetry? Unrhymed poetry with a bunch of uplifting cliches in it is also very easy to write (presumably slightly easier, since you don't have to come up with rhymes), and it also feels manipulative. And the ceiling for rhyming poetry is very high--as far as I can tell, basically nobody today *can* write rhyming poetry to the standard of the best early-20th-century metrical poets. Nobody with enough innate talent has put in enough practice in that specific skill. So you could surpass the "easy wins" of bad rhyming poetry by writing better rhyming poetry.

(Maybe there are no more great rhyming poets because rhyming poetry is totally played out and nothing original is left to do, but I don't think so. For example, I really like the modern poet AE Stallings, partly because she often varies the length between pairs of rhyming words in a really compelling way. She's better at that specific thing than the great poets of a hundred years ago, but she is not their match at, say, finding the perfect image or the right vowels and consonants for a particular effect (though she isn't terrible at these skills; I recommend her). So there is room for a poet with Stallings' knack for rhyme-distance contrasts but more skill in other areas, or a different emotional palette. I expect there are a lot of gaps like this!)

Part of what is going on with the poetry example is that we now have a slight aversion to rhyming poetry because it is thought of as childish, so writing a moving rhyming poem is harder than it was in the past--the rhyming automatically makes the reader a bit skeptical about the poet. A good poem needs to break that skepticism for the reader to actually engage with it. This is, I think, part of why older rhyming poems haven't really lost cultural esteem even among people who are into contemporary poetry--we aren't skeptical because we know why the poet has made this choice.

REPLY J Mann 2d

On comic book nerds and plot holes.

I've been watching "Pitch Meeting" videos, which are basically a jokey setup pointing out a bunch of plot holes in this or that movie, and sometimes they do an all time great movie, like Die Hard, and I have to concede there are a bunch of plot holes or contrivances that would bother me in a lesser movie.

So here's my theory - the more immersive your work is with the good stuff (pacing, characterization, plot, cinematography, etc.), the more crap (inconsistencies, plot holes, contrivances, etc.) you can get away with. And every work has some crap. But the more crap you have, the easier it is for the work to get bogged down in it.

The Last Jedi lost me when the space bombers dropped their space bombs in space, which I think was the first scene. By the time two characters left a chase scene to have a side quest (which itself was contrived and stupid) and then returned to the chase, there was almost nothing the movie could have done to win me back.

REPLY (2) TGGP 2d

I have also heard it said that if you're focused on plot holes then the movie wasn't good enough to make you ignore them. That's probably true, and my negative reviews (on Disqus still rather than Letterboxd) still bring those up, which just serves as evidence that I didn't like the film that much.

REPLY (1) Mary Catelli 1d

True. But Fridge Logic -- things that work until you get up to go to the fridge, and so have a moment to think -- can have retroactive effect.

Including moments when you realize that it was more elegant than you realized.

REPLY Retsam 2d

Shamus Young had a back-and-forth with "FILM CRITIC HULK" a few years back over the concept of plot holes (centered around the Mass Effect 3 ending debate, but talking about the concept more broadly) https://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?p=17692 - and yeah, Shamus's eventual position was essentially that the important thing is trust in the storyteller and if that takes too much 'damage' eventually the story collapses.

A lot of nitpicky plothole stuff is just symptoms of some other problem: the story didn't work for you and it's rare that the root cause was some minor continuity error or editing mistake.

And there's a "sleight of hand" aspect, which I think the FCH article mentions - the point of a movie is not to construct a flawless world of perfect logic, but to be just logical enough to deliver whatever story it's trying to tell, just as a magician is not really turning the Jack of Hearts into an Ace of Spades. If you didn't notice the issue until long after, then the story teller was a good enough magician to pull it off and you shouldn't fault the story for it.

REPLY Nancy Lebovitz 2d

I was surprised when I first read Blake. Isn't that rhythm/rhyme combination doggerel? How can it be high-status poetry?

REPLY Alex Zavoluk 2d

They should be so simple that a child could draw them.

I actually think this rule is stronger than you're giving it credit for, and you missed the most obvious argument: Most flags, even today, are viewed from a distance. Say, on a flagpole or hanging from a building. At that distance, all those little images and gold details on the Venice flag blur together. I don't particularly care how flags used to be used or whether they were practical; at a guess, I would imagine that flag was designed to meet the requirement of "Venice is rich and the doge is rich and wants to brag about how rich he and his city are" which is a bad way to design flags. Yeah, it looks cool close up on a computer screen or in a museum. That doesn't make it a good flag!

Relatedly, I'm coming to hate the use of the word "iconic." I've found that it seems to simply be a substitute for actual arguments, when someone wants to defend something that's been around for a while but can't actually find anything defensible about it. Why is it iconic? Do you actually think it looks good? If so, why not just say that?

Ironically, it's the exact same argument you criticize in the same section--you say others have just gotten used to the color/metal rules, but I think you've just gotten used to the California flag having text. As someone who doesn't live in CA and thinks the flag is "fine", I think it would look much better without the text (it's easy to find mock-ups of what that would look like on google). Even if some people like it, you can't tell just from its current or past level of popularity whether the text is helping or hurting.

REPLY (2) Bean Sprugget (bean) 2d

Yeah, I agree a lot. Like, surely flag recognizability is more correlated with that particular state/country's success than the quality of it's flag design (except for like Nepal), which in turn are not correlated at all. Also, re the "simple" rule, it seems more important to have some recognizable object in your flag, even if it is in pretty high detail in official designs. Eg, looking at the new Utah state flag, it seems a lot more complicated to draw because it's so much more abstract, whereas the Californian flag is nice because the bear you draw doesn't have to be good to still be recognizable.

REPLY Melvin 1d

Relatedly, I'm coming to hate the use of the word "iconic." I've found that it seems to simply be a substitute for actual arguments, when someone wants to defend something that's been around for a while but can't actually find anything defensible about it. Why is it iconic? Do you actually think it looks good? If so, why not just say that?

Iconic means something pretty different to just looking good.

"Iconic" means that the symbol is so strongly associated with the thing in people's minds that the actual merits of the symbol become irrelevant, people have already transferred their feelings about the actual thing onto the symbol.

As for the California flag, I think the text is only cool because it says California Republic. If it said California or State of California it would detract from the flag, but being an anachronistic commemoration of an independent California that existed for less than a month makes it much more fun.

REPLY (1) Alex Zavoluk 17h

"Iconic" means that the symbol is so strongly associated with the thing in people's minds that the actual merits of the symbol become irrelevant, people have already transferred their feelings about the actual thing onto the symbol.

Sure. But that doesn't mean that you can use the iconicity of existing things to justify features when making something new. In fact, you seem to be agreeing with me--some things get grandfathered in just because they've been around for a while, not because they're actually good, which makes it *backwards* to appeal to them to defend/criticize general rules. That's what I disagree with Scott about.

REPLY Ghatanathoah 2d

I am going to bite the bullet and say that we should respect the taste of both the aristocrat with strong opinions on wine and the uber-nerd with strong opinions on Ultra-Man's blaster range. They are both ways of increasing your appreciation of something by increased effort and attention to detail. If anything maybe we should respect the uber-nerd a little more since their taste is more legible to other people and less subject to arbitrary changes in fashion.

REPLY sclmlw 2d

One more model that's potentially useful: scriptural analysis.

Here, I'm taking about modern discussion about scriptural (e.g. biblical) stories and what they mean. Because in some sense that's what we're doing with art, right? "What does it mean? What's the intent of the artist? How does this transform you?"

There are so many books/sermons/blogs /podcasts written about the historical context of seemingly every verse (of the Bible, sure, but it's not the only one). Some of the exegesis is good/meaningful. Some is bad. Some is wrong.

For example, Jesus says that it's easier for a poor man to drive a camel through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to get into heaven. There are (at least) 3 ways to read this:

1. Apparently the word for camel is close to the word for rope. Maybe someone made a transcription error. Jesus was trying to say, "it's REALLY hard to do!" You have to learn Greek to really understand the scriptures more deeply or you'd miss this. Either learn to read Greek, or follow experts who do.

1. Apparently they used to have these gates around Jerusalem that were narrow. You couldn't get a camel through them if you were riding it. You'd have to get off, take the load off the camel, and lead it through unburdened to get through. Jesus was using an idiom the people of the day knew. The lesson is clear: you have to learn the culture and visit the place (local guides will tell this story to this day) to understand the scriptures.

1. Maybe he meant it literally. Sometimes semitic analogies were intentionally absurdist like this.

Okay, but also...

1. If we change every verse we don't understand, at what point are we just rewriting it to fit our expectations, as opposed to learning from it?

1. The "eye of a needle" structures were built a thousand years after Jesus died. They may be nicknamed after the story, but saying that this is what Jesus was talking about is an anachronism.

1. Did Jesus really mean to condemn wealthy people to hell? How literal should I take intentional absurdity?

This maps well onto art. In the end, not everyone reads the Bible and not everyone enjoys going to MoMA. But for some people the religious experience is not just viewing the art or reading the Bible, it's making sense of the thing itself that's truly transformative. In both cases, there is a central focus, but there's also a process behind how the thing is used to find a deeper place in a person's life. Some people say that their process is the only legitimate way to find meaning. Some say legitimate scripture/art must follow their strict definition of what that is.

Some say that there's a right and won't interpretation, and that anyone who follows what they define as the wrong interpretation is making a grave mistake.

Some find beauty in the Scripture/artistic genre, and devote large amounts of time to "understanding it better", whatever that truly means. Some aren't interested in it, and when others say, "but you're missing out on SO much!" they shrug and say they're fine with that.

Both have those who proselyte their appreciation, seeking others to join them. I'm sure there are other analogues here.

REPLY (1) Dabor 16h

Why do you take Jesus condemning the wealthy to hell to be "intentional absurdity"? Praising poor people who give their last scraps to those even less fortunate than they are is a running theme across his comments. Everything I know about his statements and views is consistent with the idea that you should tolerate victimization and take any opportunity to help others at cost to yourself, and you generally don't get to be rich (and stay rich) by acting like Jesus says to. If the only way to the father is through him, then surely acting in contradiction to his edicts and revealed preferences is a way to damnation?

There's still some compromises here - it's hard to know how literally one should take some of Jesus's statements that had the added bonus of avoiding getting him killed ASAP by Romans by sounding like he was trying to stir up a slave revolt - but saying "all rich people are 100% going to hell" sounds pretty consistent with everything else Jesus is recorded as saying, ignoring any exegesis-to-Jesus-himself later in the Bible where "faith in his sacrifice" was made out to be more dispositive than following or emulating his actual teachings.

REPLY artifex0 2d

Ok, wait; how were the medieval tapestry artists able to create a semi-normal cat face in the lower left of the Venice flag, but the central cat still has that horrifying ogre face that medieval artists frequently gave animals? Did they all realize how bizarre those faces looked, but felt they had to use them to conform with traditional artistic standards?

REPLY (1) artifex0 2d Edited

Actually, it looks like the real flag- a photo of which is at https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/db/%28Venice%29_Stendardo_Navale_-_Stemma_del_Doge_Domenico_Contarini_-_Museuo_Correr.jpg - has a much better cat face in the center and just sort of blur in the corner. So, I think this one is actually on whoever created the vector version.

REPLY Jiro 2d Edited

The Star Wars plot hole you mention is from the prequels, and the prequels are *famous* for being Star Wars movies that people don't like. This example is as bad as when Scott compared spending to almonds, not noticing they are the number two cash crop.

This and things like it absolutely do reduce people's enjoyment of Star Wars.

REPLY Expansive Bureaucracy 2d

Is this a test of ScottAI or a mid-finished draft posted early? The title refers to 'three model organisms' but while there are three sections only one is numbered; only one 'model organism' is described as such (and not in the numbered section). It feels... far more disjointed than usual, too.

Aside- when did the author line go away at top? Is this Mandala effect or did it used to say "by Scott Alexander" under the title for individual articles.

REPLY bloom_unfiltered 2d

I think the most common view among vexillology redditors is less "a flag must follow these rules" and more "breaking these rules is very significantly correlated with having a bad flag".

e.g. I think if you eyeball all the state flags (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flags_of_the_U.S._states_and_territories), the ones which have writing and are difficult to draw are on average worse.

REPLY Silentiarius 2d

The most elegant and dramatic national flag I know of is that of Saudi Arabia, which has its own name: the Green Banner, or al-Khafaq al-Akhdar. On a flat green field, the shahada, the Islamic declaration of faith, is inscribed in an elegant thicket of calligraphy above a naked sword. Text and sword are in white (argent) over green (vert), thus conforming perfectly to the infidel rules of tincture in western heraldry.

REPLY Matthew Talamini 2d

Hi! I have actually read enough MFA books to do more than relay the thoughts of my betters. (I have an MFA from Brown.) I think I'm adding to Scott's thesis when I say:

If you developed the one true perfect and correct aesthetics of literature, such that you knew every single rule that contributes to making a novel good, that would get you, at most, 10% of the way to writing a good novel. Random talent might get you another 10% of the way there. The other 80% is spending a lot of time writing and showing what you wrote to real people who will tell you their honest reaction to it.

I don't like the argument from authority, and I'm also a computer programmer, so I'll deploy this metaphor to buttress my claim: Imagine you read a whole big JavaScript Recipes book, and you memorized the JavaScript specification, but you had never actually coded up a website. Then you sit down and write a website with lots of custom features that require maybe 1,000 lines of JavaScript. But you never load it up in a browser while you're doing all this. You think because you've memorized the syntax and read a recipes book, it'll work.

Roughly all programmers will tell you that this website will not work as expected. You will have introduced bugs. Most likely, lots and lots of bugs. Why? Because, even when the rules of a thing are perfectly clear and well-known, the way to get good at doing it is to do it. There are people who can sit down and hack out 1,000 lines of working, bug-free JavaScript. That skill comes from having written and executed tens of millions of lines of JavaScript. By the time you get to that point, the rules aren't in your mind anymore -- they're in your fingers.

So I agree that it's fun to think about how aesthetics works, and figuring out the rules of a craft does actually help you make better art -- but not very much, compared to actually doing it. If you want to write short stories, do read A Swim In A Pond In The Rain; then go and write some short stories. If you want to make flags, get on vexillology reddit and learn the rules; then make some flags and wave them around in a bright field and see how people react.

REPLY (1) SurvivalBias 1d

Wave them around in a bright fild

Cmon, running it up the flagpole was right there

REPLY aphyer 2d

From my perspective at least, this is somewhat missing the reason I hate 'taste'.

If I want to feel favorable to taste, the obvious metaphor I find sympathetic is board games.

I have put a lot of time into playing board games. I have Views on what makes them good or bad. I Do Not Like some popular games like Monopoly and Risk, and prefer games that the hoi polloi have never heard of (and would not have the patience to get through the rulebook if they did) written by people with names like 'Vlaada Chvatil'.

Many of the things I dislike about Good Taste appear in the opposite direction here, where I'm much more sympathetic to them.

But there is a fundamental asymmetry here.

I do not demand government funding to help me pursue the Obvious Objective Good that is well-designed board games.

I do not force every child in the country to spend a large chunk of their childhood playing and talking about games they actively hate because I think it will be Good For Them.

And so I think most of this conversation is a distraction. Sure, fine, you can disputandum your gustibus all you like. But first you need to stop trying to actively force other people to come along with you.

REPLY Saint Fiasco 2d

An interesting element in your first two examples is that they are fun to talk about when you don't take the issue too seriously.

You already mentioned the vexilology memes. It might amuse you to know that the Star Wars plothole has a resolution which is also a meme: Tattoine is a sand planet and Anakin has a complicated relationship with sand. It's irritating and it gets everywhere.

The fact that people have silly fun debating those silly topics makes me wonder if serious artists also have fun debating silly high-brow topics. Maybe they are just debating random stuff for fun just like we normal nerds do, we only think it's this serious thing because the people involved are serious classy people.

REPLY I've_jello_for_arms 2d

On your questions about the AI poem, my first thought was "they would ask these as serious questions in my high school English class"

REPLY TGGP 2d Edited

Justice Alito's wife is a fiend for flags, and has complained that her husband won't let her fly all the flags she wants due to people complaining. I hope someone sends her the design for the Venice-esque American flag.

REPLY Yosarian2 2d

Your last comment is what I really think taste means and why it's valuable. When you read a lot of poetry and know a lot about poetry, you can tell the difference between good poetry and bad poetry, and it lets you enjoy and appreciate good poetry in a deeper and more meaningful way, but it also makes you more annoyed by bad poetry. Whereas someone without taste might find it all midly pleasent but not really get anything out of it

REPLY (1) Greg 1h

This reminds me of something C. S. Lewis said in Experiment in Criticism that I liked a lot, it's not that there are people who like good books and people who like bad books, it's that there are people who care about literature and people who don't understand the fuss.

REPLY toggle 2d

This series is making me want to put mathematics and aesthetics side-by-side and see what happens when you cross the streams.

Like, in principle there's nothing stopping you from critiquing mathematics using these exact arguments, right? Sure, the thing that you produced instead would not be mathematics as we understand it today, and it wouldn't be nearly as *useful* in a practical sense. Imagining mathematics in which everyone's favorite equations didn't have to follow all those fiddly little rules, where they could post lovely little "1 = 5 + 3" equations on Instagram for the likes, and anyone who insisted on the old rules was just a boorish old grognard. Or possibly a platonist.

And there are plenty of mathematicians who vocally insist that they don't pursue mathematics for the utility! I've met some myself. It's for the beauty, they tell me. So if we take those mathematicians at face value and treat mathematics as fundamentally an aesthetic project, then why not believe them?

--

The answer to a lot of this, of course, is that many of the most interesting, beautiful, and impactful things in the world can only happen under conditions of *accumulated internal complexity*.

This is most obvious in math, in which the consistency of primitive cognitive objects is kind of the name of the game, and by charting out the full range of what can be consistently expressed, we're also sort of latently charting out this incredibly beautiful space that's somehow either a deep truth about our minds, a deep truth about our cosmos, or both. Throwing all that out the window so that anybody can wander in and choose their own favorite expressions- according to the (necessarily kind of arbitrary) aesthetic preferences of a layman- may reward entryism, but it falls far short of what we actually *mean* when we say that math is beautiful.

In the arts, this is complicated by less rigid or formal rules, by the tension between an artists' judgment and that of their audience, and any number of other things. But it's still visible in many places: one of the most instructive model organisms that you don't do a deep dive into is music, because a lot of the internal complexity is still quite visible and important.

Many very popular pop music tracks are simple in a musical sense- the progression of a few chords, with some catchy vocals and a steady background percussion to set the beat. The target audience for most of these is, explicitly, teens with limited experience of either the world or of music, and they are often a *really* big deal to people- I'm not the only one who's 'activated' by the pop music that was big during my own impressionable years! But once you get outside 'your' pop music, that hit during your own particular formative years, the median pop track will come off as bland, pretty dull, and largely interchangeable with other examples of itself.

By contrast, the classical music scene is an attempt at a collection/canon of a continent's best compositions across a half-millenium or more of trying. A classical piece is typically much more internally complex, and its virtues are often lost on people who are less familiar with music as an art: many people can enjoy the Ode to Joy in the same way that they enjoy pop music, and that's part of what makes it so good, but if asked to *explain* the Ode to Joy those same people would show that they didn't fully understand it, and mostly lack the language to even start doing so. This isn't about memorizing the notes or being able to mechanically replicate it- it's about understanding why the notes are where they are, and how those choices contribute to the final experience. What scales is it written in? What is the piece's theme, and how is that theme manipulated and expressed over time? Which instrumental voices are the main voices in each section, and how do supporting harmonies contribute?

Here, the more you learn about music composition, the *less* classical music resembles itself, and the more you start to understand the radical differences between pieces, time periods, and artists. It still might not be your preference: just because you understand what Mahler was doing, doesn't mean that you like listening to his work. But you can recognize a high degree of subtlety, and mastery of the form, because you're familiar with the enormous potential complexity that the 'rules' of music composition lead to.

In fact those rules are by no means the only way to create sounds that an audience will enjoy! But making noise at an audience without *any* structure will produce only the simplest sounds, and trying to explore the space of 'sounds' comprehensively, without any simplifying guides at all, will just be a hundred thousand variations on pointless white noise for every one halfway-interesting experience. Different musical traditions can have different 'rules' of music, which are equally capable of subtle manipulation and internal complexity, but you do need to have *some* kind of structure in there or else it's all just a giant wet blob. And once you have structure, you have different degrees of mastery, and once you have different degrees of mastery, you have different degrees of appreciation.

Taste, in other words, as the distinction between an aesthetic appreciation drawn from our own arbitrary circumstances or biology, and aesthetic appreciation drawn from our accumulated knowledge and understanding of the art itself.

The same is true, one way or another, of most aesthetic experience; it's just more obvious and measurable in music. If coffee or booze is to be measured by its appeal upon your first drink of the stuff, it's terrible. But you 'develop a taste' for it, with dedicated effort. Similarly, if you're familiar with the mechanics of the visual arts, there are ways to appreciate a painting that are distinct from the impulse that a novice would have, and those forms of appreciation are the domain of taste. You can develop taste in any sufficiently complex domain- even your AI 2027 scenario talks about 'research taste' in model capacity, and that is not a particularly loose analogy to artistic taste.

Of course, as you note in the case of vexillology, you can get trapped in overly limiting or stupid rules; in general, the arts' solution to this problem is to bundle those people under a blanket term like "the rectangularists' and deny the argument by saying "oh, I'm challenging the rectangularist tradition with my bold choice of totally sick flying lions." (That, in turn, has a way of dumping them in overly *permissive* modes, in which mastery is equally uninteresting because of structurelessness. But, you know, these are not solved problems, and you can fail a hundred times to generate good internal complexity as long as you succeed on the hundred and first.)

REPLY (1) spinantro 2d

Many very popular pop music tracks are simple in a musical sense- the progression of a few chords, with some catchy vocals and a steady background percussion to set the beat.

You are strategically limiting the definition of "musical" here to functional harmony and related concepts. Music is much more than that (I'm only talking about the sonic aspects here mind you, not personality or marketing) and along some axes of musicality pop music is much more sophisticated than classical music.

But once you get outside 'your' pop music, that hit during your own particular formative years, the median pop track will come off as bland, pretty dull, and largely interchangeable with other examples of itself.

It's exactly the same with classical music if you go outside the few big names.

but if asked to *explain* the Ode to Joy those same people would show that they didn't fully understand it, and mostly lack the language to even start doing so.

Same would happen if you asked the average person to explain what makes a great pop track great. Your own post is a case in point.

REPLY Tom Metcalf 2d

The frenzy of re-design of city and state flags in the US that has happened over the past decade or so is more or less the direct result of Roman Mars's TED talk, https://youtu.be/pnv5iKB2hl4?si=5zpzGXbf8JdumhJl Mars uses the rules from "Good Flag, Bad Flag" which are mostly the ones here, except not the thing about metals and colours and fur: a child should be able to draw it from memory, use only a few colors, meaningful symbolism, no writing, and be distinct.

But one of Mars's arguments in favor of the flag design rules was that a flag that followed them was also an open-source, publicly owned design language that can be endlessly repurposed as a source of civic pride and identity. The best examples of this are Chicago and DC, where the flags themselves, and endless variations on the flag design, are displayed all over the city. In DC, the "three of something over two bar-like elements" is found in all sorts of local business logos and is an especially commonplace as a way to distinguish DC-the-city from DC-the-seat-of-the-Federal-government.

REPLY (1) Sniffnoy 2d

Chicago flag is all over Chicago too.

REPLY walruss 2d

Often factual errors are important, but it's context-dependent. Example:

A common problem fiction writers have is that two things need to happen at the same time for pacing reasons. But one of those things clearly takes much much longer than others. As an example, in Empire Strikes Back Luke needs to be "trained in the force," a task that's implied to take months or years of work. At the same time, Han, Leia, and Chewie need to escape a pursuing fleet. And then they all meet up in Cloud City for the awesome Vader/Luke confrontation. This makes no sense.

But it's not bad writing. It's fine. Star Wars is meant to be half a fairy tale presented with a lot of compelling aesthetics. It comes from a long line of similar stories. Some versions of Sleeping Beauty have her and the kingdom sleep for 100 years. Le Morte d'Arthur just blatantly contradicts itself repeatedly and is still considered a masterpiece. With legend and myth we recognize that the morality and emotionality is more important than the actual plot mechanics.

On the other hand, A Song of Ice and Fire set out to *critique* romantic fantasy. Its whole purpose is to read Lord of the Rings and go "psh, it wouldn't happen that way." Huge portions of the plot hinge directly on the realities of medieval travel time. If Martin suddenly said "I'm sick of thinking about logistics and Star Wars gets away with that crap all the time," he'd break his implied contract with the readers.

The important part is that these pieces of art all exist in *conversation* with the others. Star Wars only works because it's applying novel aesthetics/setting to common tropes its writers are already familiar with. ASOIAF only works because it's a reaction to existing fantasy works. That's the missing ingredient in a lot of these discussions.

The deeper you get into an art form, the more conversation and context you have around each piece you look at. That's why people can like "bad" poetry and you can say "well it's not exactly a cliche but it feels cliche-y." It wasn't a cliche to you the first time you saw something similar. And you have "better" taste in poetry than people who are seeing it for the first time.

REPLY (1) Melvin 1d

As an example, in Empire Strikes Back Luke needs to be "trained in the force," a task that's implied to take months or years of work. At the same time, Han, Leia, and Chewie need to escape a pursuing fleet. And then they all meet up in Cloud City for the awesome Vader/Luke confrontation. This makes no sense.

Ah but you will recall that Han, Leia and Chewie were in the Millenium Falcon with a broken hyperdrive, travelling between star systems at a high but sublight speed. So that's just relativity, more time passes for Luke than for Han. One of those rare times that Star Wars actually makes more sense than its creators intended.

REPLY (1) walruss 1d

Ha! Love it.

REPLY (1) John Schilling 20h Edited

I'm tempted to say Boba Fett deserves credit for his extreme patience. But it's also possible he figured out Bespin was the only plausible destination, it would take N months without hyperdrive, and trying to find a ship in deep intestellar space is a fool's errand so go collect a bunch of other bounties before showing up on Bespin at the appointed hour.

Also, this is a fun game so long as the creators give us a reasonably coherent playground.

REPLY Maxim Nazarenko 2d

Is a comic series that doesn’t make any of these mistakes “better” than one that does?

My take is that _all other things being equal_ a series without such mistakes is indeed better than one that does, BUT all other things are never equal.

REPLY spinantro 2d

I must confess I lost track of what actually *is* your thesis regarding taste. Would you mind stating it as succinctly as you can muster? (This is a genuine request, not some attempt to find a gotcha or something. I just think it would be nice to have this and then read these posts again with it in mind.)

This is more fuzzy but I have some kind of is/ought uncertainty about your projected opinion: are you saying "this is how taste works in the real human world" or "given how taste works we would all be happier if culture were organized differently" or "you might be personally happier by adopting these attitudes about taste" or...

REPLY Ralph 2d

David Hume has a short essay on Taste, where he tries to reason about which aspects should be considered objective vs subjective.

https://davidhume.org/texts/empl1/st

I agree with a lot of what he says, especially the claim tastes is (at least partially) about someone's ability to percieve objective features of the things they're judging.

As an example, someone who can drink wine and accurately report every ingredient is likely to have "better taste" than someone who has more dull senses. Or someone who percieves every intentional symmetry in a painting vs someone who misses them. This also helps explain why we say more exposure to a field is correlated with better taste, ex: a botanist will be able to distinguish more specific elements of a tree than an average person.

My main beef with this essay is that he talks about things like "proper functioning of sense organs" (ex: colorblind people). It's fine to ground a notion of good taste on the "standard" human, but I think it's better to plant the flag on your own particular sensory apparatus.

REPLY R. Kevin Wichowski-Hill 2d

David Bowie once said that artists should cultivate cliche, for the sake of intelligibility. Maybe Hemingway was a Bowie fan!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sun_Also_Rises

REPLY Tyrone Slothrop 2d

Apparently people have strong feelings about things like this.

“Another city just voted to fly the former Minnesota state flag”

https://www.startribune.com/another-city-just-voted-to-fly-the-former-minnesota-state-flag/601785885?utm_source=gift

REPLY (2) Bugmaster 1d Edited

I've seen neither the new nor the old flag before, but I think they both suck, just for different reasons. Fight me IRL, Reddit vexillologists !

REPLY Silentiarius 1d

Seriously, does anyone other than local politicians desperate for publicity really give a damn about state (or city) flags one way or the other, never mind have strong feelings about them?

REPLY (2) John Schilling 20h

Bo, Luke, and a whole lot of like-minded rednecks have feelings on the matter. Not technically a state flag, but formerly incorporated in several IIRC.

There are a few other state flags that have enough history behind them that a non-trivial number of people do care. Texas and California are both on that list. But you're right that it's not a thing for most states.

REPLY (1) Silentiarius 18h

Yes, I take your point about there being some exceptions. The Lone Star flag in particular was for a brief decade the national flag of the independent Texas Republic!

REPLY Tyrone Slothrop 19h

I’m still nursing my grudge that Ed McMahon would laugh at anything. One grievance at a time for me.

REPLY Sniffnoy 2d

I feel like I've spent a decent amount of time hanging around flag people and never heard of this "rule of tincture"? As I think other people have mentioned, it seems like a centralizing text for this stuff in recent times has been "Good Flag, Bad Flag" (which I can't say I entirely agree with -- why so few colors?), and it doesn't mention this rule. I haven't heard it mentioned in CGP Grey's videos rating flags, or on Josh Parson's page grading flags, etc. Those aren't exactly sources for people who really want to go in-depth on flags, but like, that's my point, they're better-known, they're giving explicit rules, and they don't mention that.

(I have to say I really like the Maryland flag. Yes it's a little on the complex side but it, like, makes sense -- its complexity is really just a few simple patterns composed with one another!)

As for Star Wars, it's worth remembering that this isn't a plot hole in the original film. When George Lucas says he always intended Darth Vader to be Luke's father, he's lying; that idea wasn't even in the early drafts of the second film. It's pure retcon, and it creates other minor holes beyond the one you mentioned. Anyway if you want to read way too much about this sort of thing you can go read "The Secret History of Star Wars".

REPLY MostlyCredibleHulk 2d

I mean, the current US flag has decent variety already, but I wouldn't mind having a "special flag" in Venetian style. And yes, there should be 50 rectangular elements on the right, of course, with a tiny state flag incorporated in each one. Our budget is 7 trillion, we can afford it. Also would be a good test case for all that cafepress software and hardware - if you can't do your nation's flag, you don't deserve the noble name of an online flag printing shop.

REPLY Michael Watts 2d

Flags were originally intended to distinguish friend from foe on the battlefield. To serve this purpose, they ought to be easily distinguishable from far away, through smoke, dust, etc. There’s no way anyone could read text in these conditions.

Traditional Chinese battlefield pennants consist solely of text.

REPLY beleester 2d Edited

Have you seen Shamus Young's essay on "story collapse"? https://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?p=17745

When someone starts nitpicking plot holes, it usually indicates that enough small flaws have built up that they're no longer invested in the story and don't trust the author to make it all work out in a satisfying way. The nitpicks are a symptom of the failure as much as a reason for it.

If the nerd got invested in the story, he would instead be saying "Well it's normally 1000 feet, but Issue 234 shows that when in Ultra Focus his range extends to 1500 feet, and the look of concentration on his face shows he was using that ability. What a deep cut!"

(It sort of goes both ways, really - an accumulation of sloppy mistakes can signal that the author doesn't care enough to make great art, and bad art makes you less inclined to extend charity to sloppy mistakes.)

REPLY Michael Watts 2d

Two of the best-looking flags out there are Saudi Arabia (image, text) and Kazakhstan (image).

https://saudiflag.sa/en

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Flag_of_Kazakhstan.svg

REPLY Man in White 2d

"It’s too much of an “easy win” - too good with too little work" - so, kitch? This section just reminded how artists absolutely loathe Thomas Kinkade.

REPLY Kronopath 2d

I think you’re wrong about the motivation behind the Reddit-esque flag rules. I think the actual (maybe unspoken?) motivation is that flags are branding.

If you’re a government trying to instil a sense of national pride, you don’t just want your flag to sit on a flagpole on your legislature. You want to have it everywhere: pins, hats, buildings, tattoos, food boxes, locally-made products, even other brands (McDonald’s Canada has a tiiiny maple leaf in the golden arches). It needs to be flexible enough to survive all that remixing and recontextualization while still being instantly recognizable regardless of the skill of the designer. This naturally lends itself to simple shapes, flat colours, and minimal details.

This is the same creative pressure that’s caused corporate logos to become oversimplified as corporations start wanting to stick their logos everywhere.

You call out Brazil as a country whose flag “violates the conventions” but as someone of Brazilian descent, I’d argue that it’s a case of its strengths outweighing its weaknesses from a branding perspective.

The basics of the flag are three simple shapes: blue circle inside a yellow diamond inside a green rectangle. This simplified version of the flag, which drops the white stripe and the stars, is EVERYWHERE in Brazil, on a whole host of products and places and surfaces, and it’s just as recognizable without the details as it is with them.

Sometimes, if there’s a bit more room, you’ll see the white stripe, but it’s pretty rare that you’ll see the flag in its full form with its stars and the words “Order and Progress” intact, outside of actual flagpoles or other places where you have space for that kind of detail.

I mean, check out the emoji: 🇧🇷. What details can you pick out, and which are lost? Is the flag any less recognizable for losing them?

Compare that with the Venetian lion. If it loses its details, it becomes borderline unrecognizable.

Now, since we’re talking about matters of taste here, you could firmly plant yourself in the camp of “Details are good, actually, and fuck the idea that flags should be branding”. That’s a message you can definitely choose to portray with your flag, and it has a sort of punk-rock “fuck the elites” appeal. Maybe even anticapitalist or anarchist? But if you’re going for that, you shouldn’t be surprised when the elites snub their nose at you, since the message you’re sending is in direct opposition to them.

So I think the rules are defensible, at least from some perspectives. Except the rule of tincture, that one really is outdated bullshit.

REPLY Stonehead 2d

This series is kind of infuriating. Scott is clearly very passionate about poetry but apathetic about visual art. (I don't mean this as an insult, I'm passionate about visual art, but apathetic about poetry and architecture.) That seems to be all there is to it. The aesthetic quality of the ai poem bother him in a way that I wouldn't notice from a single out of context example, and the aesthetic quality of the ai images bother me in a way that he wouldn't notice from a single out of context example. The way he describes the poem is so similar to the feelings I get when he talks about visual art or music just being pretentious signaling games. It makes me want to scream "this is how we feel too! I believe you about your poetry appreciation. Why can't you believe us about our art appreciation?" The ai art turning test actually showed that artists were able to differentiate relatively well between these cherry picked examples. I got somewhere in the high 70s on it.

More importantly, hypothetical examples about someone claiming to be sophisticated and being wrong don't help the argument unless if you actually demonstrate that people do it in real life. Regarding the sculpture example from the last post, certainly art viewers are fooled by forgeries, but I don't think they are often fooled by mass produced consumer-grade McMansion decorations.

If I said "imagine if you ran a bunch of trials that showed drug A performed better than drug B in clinical trials, but then when you try them in the real world, drug B performs better", this wouldn't carry any weight unless of I demonstrated that this is the sort of thing that actually happens with this type of drug. In Scott's wine post a while back, he showed that this happens between high quality Italian and Californian wine. Notably though, it wasn't happening between high quality Italian wine and bottom shelf box wine.

REPLY JohanL 2d

One way I think the taste thing can be rationally argued:

"These people had to come up with a name, one of the most important thing in the project, and they couldn't do better than this? Now my confidence in them is reduced."

REPLY Argos 2d

You’re trying to manipulate me by doing easy things that you know will work, and the fact that it slightly does work just makes it even more galling!

"Low effort" is a near-universally-disliked attribute of art (or "art" if it's low-enough effort). Probably as close to a universal as you'll find.

Typing "make me a poem" is about as low-effort as it gets, so that is seen as shit even if the outcome is otherwise decent (ofc in this case it's not, but if it were).

It's the same criticism people level at e.g. Pollack or Rothko - "my five-year-old could do that" is actually the criticism "this is low-effort 'art'" (ofc Pollack and Rothko are not trivially imitated, as they are actually extremely high-effort art and very difficult to do, but that perception instantly makes it impossible to appreciate).

And it's also why you feel cheated by the mass-produced Michaelangelo you mentioned previously. Much of the meaning of the David was imbued by the long hours spent learning to perfect the craft required to execute it, and the long hours invested in actually making it. If there was a race of giants or djinns or what-have-you that could churn out David-esque statues effortlessly on demand and Michaelangelo had asked them to make him a David statue, nobody would care - it would be low-effort "art".

Art is, in no small part, a connection to and appreciation of the effort that went into making it. If it turns out no effort went into it, then we feel cheated, as that effort is the critical bedrock of art appreciation.

REPLY (1) NotG 1d Edited

Is it though? There is tons of low-effort uber famous art. Warhol has several. So does Yayoi Kasuma, Roy Lichtenstein, Edward Rusha, Takashi Murakami, Keith Haring, Marcel Duchamp

REPLY (1) Argos 1d

Yes, it is, and I'll tell you why those seeming exceptions still fall under that general rubric.

You'll notice that Duchamp - to take one example - did not spawn an entire genre of urinal art in galleries (notwithstanding pubs near fine arts programs where students to this day scrawl "R Mutt" on urinals).

The difficulty of that kind of art is in breaking that new ground, thinking of an idea that's never been done before, and having the audacity to do it.

Once it's been done once, it's trivially easy for anyone else to do, and so completely without value as art.

It's a one-off "effort"/difficulty, and only that first instance is praised, as that was the only time putting a urinal in a gallery under a phony signature required any effort at all.

REPLY (2) NotG 1d Edited

Disagree. For one, I was't refering to Duchamp's Urinal but in any case, plenty of artists have made art similar to those other artists having never seen the work of those other artists. Being the first to hang a blank frame on a wall doesn't make your effort better if someone else also does it having never seen yours. In fact I'd argue, many of those artists work was done by other artists before them. The difference is luck and promotion, not effort or being first

REPLY (1) Argos 1d

The difference is luck and promotion, not effort or being first

Sure, that's always going to play a role.

I'd add that artists like Warhol and Duchamp are famous but hardly universally liked or even respected.

A lot of people think much of their stuff is low-effort garbage and basically worthless. Like, a lot.

Anyway, nothing is absolute or totally universal, but I think "art needs effort to be valuable" is about as close as you can get in art criticism.

REPLY Melvin 1d Edited

You'll notice that Duchamp - to take one example - did not spawn an entire genre of urinal art in galleries (notwithstanding pubs near fine arts programs where students to this day scrawl "R Mutt" on urinals).

Urinals specifically no, but a urinal in an art gallery is equivalent to a banana duct-taped to the wall of an art gallery ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comedian_(artwork) ) and apparently this was still considered clever by someone as of 2024.

At some point by complaining about this sort of thing you're just feeding the trolls, it's the equivalent of kids who were recently saying "Six Seven", not understanding why, except that they knew it annoyed the adults who couldn't figure out why they were saying Six Seven.

REPLY (1) Argos 1d

Yeah it resurfaces occasionally as essentially troll art, but it's not really respected and people basically think anyone doing it is a troll. Even if it's about to gin up a certain amount of press and publicity, it's really just marveling at the stupidity, not appreciating it is as art qua art.

REPLY Siggi Prendergast 2d

I'm never sure who is levying this label of bad taste in these scenarios. No one in the art world that I speak to seems to care much for taste (and if they do they're forgoing it a lá John Waters). I'm wondering if this is more a West Coast phenomena.

REPLY WSCFriedman 2d

You can go further. A nitpicky uber-nerd will spot that Ultra-Man’s laser is described as having a range of 1,000 feet in “Ultra-Man Behind The Scenes”. But in Ultra-Man #88, he was seen flying above the Empire State Building and shooting someone on the ground, even though the building is 1,250 feet tall. Is a comic series that doesn’t make any of these mistakes “better” than one that does?

Yes. In order to write a story where the readers go "oh no, Ultra-Man's in trouble!" Ultra-Man needs to have fairly consistent powers. Fight scenes can be a subtype of fair-play mysteries; if you don't have rules set, the answer is just "oh, he'll pull more power out of his ass when the author wants him to win, and lose when the author wants him to lose" and that's death to suspension of disbelief. There's lots of ways to play with this so the audience is fine with it (the hero's strength depends on his convictions, so villains can beat him by messing with his mind) but that then binds you to new restrictions. A fight scene that violates Sanderson's First Law is directly symmetrical to a murder mystery where someone committed the murder by being in two places at once.

REPLY ragnarrahl 2d

On the 1250+ foot shot with a laser with an effective range of 1000 feet.

Firearms get published with "maximum effective ranges." People shoot things at ranges past those all the time, it's just not recommended by the manufacturer. You publish the maximum effective range as the range at which you can reliably accomplish the objective.

The mechanism for a laser losing effectiveness at range may be a little different, but the logic shouldn't be-- just because past 1000 feet is not a reliable accomplishment does not mean it is not a possible one.

REPLY Admond Kyre 2d

I seem to recall from somewhere (I think it was one of the Obi-Wan novels) that the explanation that author provided for why Luke was raised on Tatooine is that it was the one place in the galaxy that Obi-Wan was confident Vader wouldn't return to, considering Anakin's bad personal history there (and his dislike of sand).

REPLY crispin 1d Edited

With my musician hat on, I have reached the same conclusion as your last section. Music that pulls emotional strings is good, but cheese is where the emotional manipulation becomes too obvious. Obviously this point depends on the awareness of the listener.

REPLY John Schilling 1d

Granted, in the 21st century, we're not trying to recognize armies by their flags on the battlefield. Everybody's camouflaged and trying not to be seen at all.

But, this being the 21st century, flags do need to be recognized even when they're shrunk to the size of emojis.

Some degree of complexity is allowable if the flag is still recognizable with the complexity blurred away - the ornate eagle on the Albanian flag works because "symmetric black shape centered on a red field, nothing else", points to the Albanian flag in any context where the Albanian flag would plausibly be. And California's flag is still quite distinct even if you can't read the text or tell the bear from a housecat. Ditto e.g. Brazil. But not any of the US state flags that are just a text-n-stuff-on-white-circle state seal on a blue field.

REPLY Anon_Reader 1d

"Above, I used the word “manipulating”, and I sort of stand by that. It’s too much of an “easy win” - too good with too little work." There is a word for this. That word is hack

a shortcut to something that reads as in good taste/effective and fools many people with bad taste/no taste. People well-versed in the medium know the trick and find it cheap. The plebs slurp it up

"You’re trying to manipulate me by doing easy things that you know will work, and the fact that it slightly does work just makes it even more galling!" Yes. They are hacks

REPLY Scott Aaronson 1d

As first I misread “Infinita” as “Intifada,” and was like, *of course* that’s a bad name for a model city…

REPLY Julia 1d

In 5th grade all the classes were different nations for field day, and my class was meant to reproduce the Saudi Arabian flag on green construction paper. None of us could do the Arabic calligraphy in any way, so the teacher told us "just scribble." Maybe not the international experience that was intended.

REPLY Dweomite 1d

A story with consistent rules isn't merely a more impressive artifact (though it is that), it is also a more _functional_ artifact in the sense that you can do more things with it. Readers can imagine different actions the hero might take and extrapolate their consequences. Writers can compress a dramatic reveal into a tighter punch by relying on the audience understanding the implications. You can have solvable mysteries and the thrill of genuine insights.

You aren't obliged to care about those things, but there is an actual difference in capabilities, not just in preferences.

REPLY Linch 1d

you know what *else* rises every morning? ;)

REPLY Suman Suhag 1d

It’s about controlling what those systems can do and how far they are allowed to go.

While the United States is tightening oversight and testing advanced AI models for security risks before release, Europe is moving in a different direction softening parts of its AI regulation to reduce pressure on businesses and stay competitive.

This contrast reveals something deeper.

There is no single path to governing AI.

Some are prioritizing control.

Others are prioritizing growth.

But both are responding to the same reality:

AI is no longer just innovation.

It is infrastructure.

Power.

And potential risk.

As capabilities accelerate, the world is being forced to make a choice.

how to balance speed with safety.

Because the same systems driving progress

can also expose vulnerabilities, reshape economies, and redefine global power.

What we are witnessing is not just technological evolution.

It is the formation of a new global framework:

Different rules.

Different priorities.

One shared consequence.

The future of AI will not be shaped by technology alone.

but by the decisions made around it.

And those decisions are already diverging.

REPLY kyb 1d Edited

I suggest "clichoid" as a word to mean something that may not be an actual cliché, but is sufficiently like one to trigger the traditional clichaic disgust.

REPLY B Civil 1d Edited

There is something I would call presence that I think is part of this inquiry. Being in the room with an object made by another human being, i.e., a sculpture or a painting, for instance, has a dimension that seeing a reproduction just does not have. This question, of course, doesn't even arise until you're at all interested in what you're looking at, but it matters. What has that got to do with taste? Well quite a bit. There is a lot more information available for you to make judgments with, for one. More things to consider.

Music: Going to a concert or a recital, as opposed to listening to a CD, is rather fraught with externalities but as a general case I think you can get a lot more out of listening to recorded music than you could just by looking at photographic reproductions of various paintings, sculptures, or other art objects. On one level taste is just another cultural phenomenon that waxes and wanes in accordance with the times. So it's kind of hard to put a box around it, isn't it? Taste is purely dependent on one's own sensibilities, but also is affected a lot by the sensibilities of others who we perhaps admire or aspire to. I think taste even extends to a characterological interpretation of a particular artist; we have the outlaw artists of our history and we have the “establishment” artists of our history; the good guys and the bad guys just like in a western. Think of Franz Kafka and Henry James not in terms of their prose but in terms of their characterological references.

So if you’re going to try and make a case about whether Picasso is better than van Gogh in terms of your taste it’s not that hard, but in any objective sense I don’t see how it’s possible.

REPLY prosa123 1d

There’s something to be said for Nepal’s flag, as it’s not rectangular.

REPLY Malcolm Storey 20h

1,000 feet is correct to one significant figure.

REPLY zahmahkibo 19h Edited

the vexillology counter-revolution has some good points. all reasonable models should nonetheless reject "seal on bedsheet" flags.

specifically, the US state flags that are just the state seal on a white or blue background. Illinois, Kentucky, around a dozen more.

• too busy to be recognizable (unlike eg. Arizona)

• not weird enough to be interesting (unlike eg. Maryland)

• no marginal symbolic utility (the seal is already an official symbol independent of flag design)

REPLY austin 18h

Bad puns also piss me off for reasons unknown to me I hope you can get to the bottom of this

REPLY Dabor 17h

One complicating factor on the topic of Plot Holes I rarely see people brought up is how fun they can be to talk about for people. I've gotten more enjoyment out of TLJ - via people tearing it apart on every level - than I have out of many pieces of media with more ironclad writing. I spent a month or two agonizingly slowly reading through Fifty Shades of Grey with my then-new girlfriend as we stopped every time we had comments to criticize it (albeit occasionally stopping to admire some prose we actually liked). When you cross the streams of "so bad it's good" with the fun of socialization, you can have an entire hobby consisting of talking about things you dislike at the core.

Heck I often only-half-jokingly compare my enjoyment of reviews of bad movies and in-depth debunks of religious evangelists or political grifters. Taking something that has dumb stuff in it, pointing out why it's dumb in a clever way, and using that to segue into broader discussions of merit is also half of what I like the Book Reviews on ACX for. I feel like the enjoyable social elements of "pick apart thing that is bad or wrong" are a very distinct beast of their own that don't perfectly map to the underlying aesthetic tastes. There's no fun to be had talking to someone else whose favorite color is purple about how people whose favorite color is green don't have as many things that are purple. But if a greenist tried to justify a diatribe about how team purple needs to be put in camps, I'd probably find it interesting to hear their justifications torn to shreds by a decently clever writer-and-arguer.

I can definitely see a side of status games buried somewhere in here, but I think the sheer potential for enjoyable socialization on the topic of "why the thing we dislike is bad" is inevitably going to play a major part in discussing anything founded in constant cyclical socialization (like a subreddit or a major fandom).

REPLY hnau 16h Edited

I think I mostly bite the movie plot bullet. There are several aspects of movies that can be worth appreciating-- action, visual design, dialogue-- but surely plot / story has to be in the top five. And the whole way story works is that it's a dialogue between your expectations and what's being shown-- you're building a mental model of "what might / will happen and why" as you go and the story is engaging with that model. Normal people watching movies complain about incoherent plots all the time, it has to be one of the top reasons to dislike a movie, and it's extremely lindy (most, though not all, storytelling genres, expect coherence in some form). Plot quality is more like art actually looking good than modern art being good for arcane reasons.

And for whatever it's worth, I believe there's a tossed-off reference somewhere in the Star Wars canon to Anakin not wanting to visit or think about Tatooine ever again after what happened in the prequels. It's obviously a retroactive justification given how ho-hum Vader is about ending up there A New Hope, and a pretty flimsy one at that, but the fact that people felt obligated to include it says something about what makes a story work. Contrast that with the horrifyingly lazy attitude toward plot mechanics in the sequel trilogy which is a big part of what turned people off of those movies.

REPLY Demarquis 15h

I really like the Michigan State flag: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flag_of_Michigan#/media/File:Flag_of_Michigan.svg

Tubor!!

As for taste, factor in that subverting the tastes of aesthetic opinion leaders is also often thought of as a sign of sophisticated taste.

I think what you have here is a classic competition of frames: there is no actual universal standard of good taste, but there is a competition over social status by proposing in-group boundaries and laying claim to being the cool kids. The trick is you have to convince a majority of the public that your group is better at defining good taste than an average member of the majority is. This would be surprisingly easy ("Agree with us and you're in--unlike all those other rubes") except for the competition ("Those guys are asshole$, join us instead").

Like tribal boundaries, standards of good taste are ephemeral and dynamic by their very nature.

REPLY (1) onodera 13h

It reminds me of this ad: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuborg_Brewery#/media/File:Tuborg-%C3%98l_af_Erik_Henningsen.png

Tuborg!!

REPLY zzzzort 12h Edited

Saying that the flags need to be simple to be recognizable on a battlefield is pretty clearly a strawman. There are a lot of contexts where flags are displayed far away or shrunk down, and you want the flag to look recognizable and (hopefully) still good.

A common use case for flags is an olympic medal table or as an emoji. Wikipedia (e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_Summer_Olympics_medal_table) uses flags only 60 pixels high. Brazil's flag still looks cool, but the words are literally not rendered. Iran's flag it just upside Hungary with a smudge in the middle. At that resolution the old venetian flag still has a recognizable winged lion (good!) but is otherwise illegible.

REPLY The Solar Princess 11h

but a hypothetical (blue then red then white) tricolor wouldn’t be okay

That's not a hypothetical, that's just Russian (from down to up)

REPLY prosa123 9h

While we’re on the subject of movie plot holes, we’ve all seen the Wizard of Oz scene in which Dorothy and the Scarecrow use the oil can to free up the Tin Man’s rusted joints so he can talk and move.

Tin doesn’t rust.

REPLY Charles Midi 8h

Orwell's "politics and the English language" describes very well why I hate the example of AI poetry here. If you hate it too and are having trouble articulating why, you might find it helpful : https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwell/essays-and-other-works/politics-and-the-english-language/ . I identify the sort of pseudo-cliches generated by AI with the "dying metaphors" orwell describes. Though maybe it would be more accurate to call them "stillborn metaphors" since there was never a time when they evoked any real image.

REPLY mukul Namagiri 8h

Hi,

Your content on ai safety has been phenomenal to say the least. I have been an avid admirer of your work.

Over the past couple of week I have been working on a good series of blogs related to ai safety being not associated with any of the formal body I have been trying to go against the current would be a great help if you would be kind enough to share the content with your fellow peers if you find this relevant

https://factity.github.io/fairness/draftnormal

Series of blogs

https://factity.github.io/fairness/love

Best regards,

Mukul namagiri

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