Bears; Beets; Battlestar Galactica
10/12/2021
Author’s Note: For a second I considered actually trying to tie the topics in this edition to bears, beets, and Battlestar Galactica, but we’re not doing that. Also probably not keeping up the alliteration thing. We’re doing it live and figuring it all out though!
Bryson DeChambeau
I’ve got pretty eclectic interests, so this newsletter will probably touch on a bunch of different topics. One thing I am not very interested in is sports. That said, the little I know about Bryson DeChambeau (a golfer, for those similarly disinclined towards sports) I find absolutely fascinating.
David Perell has written about DeChambeau a bit, and I thought he gave a good rundown in this post:
Bryson DeChambeau knew that the conventional wisdom, “drive for show, putt for dough,” was wrong. Known as “The Mad Scientist of Golf,” he’s spent the last ten years questioning conventional assumptions about how golf is played. He started with a controversial 1969 book called The Golfing Machine which describes 144 ways to swing a golf club and inspired him to adopt a single-plane swing… Bryson determined that if he wanted to be #1 in the world, he needed to drive the ball farther—challenging the popular belief that accuracy was more important than distance.
To hit the ball farther, Bryson changed his diet and his golf swing… to improve his technique, he studied the world’s long drive champions. This is interesting because these guys are considered specialized golfers who are trained to drive the ball far but not score well. Adopting their form was akin to a marathon runner studying sprinters, but Bryson did it anyway.
Now, he’s 40 pounds heavier and the longest driver on tour. In 2019, he ranked 24th and 34th in strokes-gained off-the-tee and driving distance respectively. One year later, he’s first in both categories. This is unheard of.
And all of this fiddling paid off when DeChambeau won the US Open in 2020.
For obvious reasons, I have very little to say on the golf-front here, but I like this as a kind of life lesson. It’s easy to look around at successful people and assume that they’ve got everything figured out. As the Guardian asked in 2007, will MySpace ever lose its monopoly? How could the big guy lose?
And then there’s the efficient market argument against innovation. You could imagine some of the conversations DeChambeau may have had when he was deciding to reinvent his golf swing and gain 40 pounds. “Do you really think no one has thought of trying this before? People want to win – there’s millions of dollars on the line! If doing your strategy would help them win, don’t you think they would’ve done it?” It’s like the old economist koan: if you see a $20 bill on the street, burn it.
There’s also that great moment in the history of science when Nobel laureate and the head of the University of Chicago physics department, Albert Michelson, declared:
The more important fundamental laws and facts of physical science have all been discovered, and these are now so firmly established that the possibility of their ever being supplanted in consequence of new discoveries is exceedingly remote… Our future discoveries must be looked for in the sixth place of decimals
He of course said this in 1894, a mere handful of years before the discovery of quantum mechanics and the theory of relativity.
Sometimes we get caught in local maxima, and rethinking things from first principles can get you to cool places. If you’re really interested in fiddling around in some area, don’t let the haters get you down. Running around looking for $20 bills might not be the best way to earn a living, but sometimes when you’re walking around, you do indeed find money on the ground.
Beauty
I thought this article from Scott Alexander was fun and thought-provoking. Alexander begins the piece by describing a tongue-in-cheek conspiracy theory about the empire of Tartaria:
Imagine a postapocalyptic world. Beside the ruined buildings of our own civilization - St. Peter’s Basilica, the Taj Mahal, those really great Art Deco skyscrapers - dwell savages in mud huts. The savages see the buildings every day, but they never compose legends about how they were built by the gods in a lost golden age. No, they say they themselves could totally build things just as good or better. They just choose to build mud huts instead, because they’re more stylish.
This is the setup for my all-time favorite conspiracy theory, Tartaria. Its true believers say we are those savages. We live in the shadow of the Taj Mahal, Art Deco skyscrapers, etc. But our buildings look like this: [picture of ugly building]
So (continues the conspiracy) probably we suffered some kind of apocalypse a hundred-ish years ago. Our elites are keeping it quiet, and have altered the records, but they haven’t been able to destroy all the buildings of the lost world. Their cover story is that technology and wealth level haven’t regressed or anything, those kinds of buildings have just “gone out of style”.
Tartaria is kind of funny to think about, but it also seems like a pretty savage indictment of our civilization. We put a man on the moon – can we really not build buildings like 1500s Europeans?! We might be tempted to try to save face by just saying “well, we could build beautiful buildings – we just choose not to!”. But, that almost feels worse. It’s one thing to lose your smarts. Happens to all of us over time. But to lose your soul – your taste for beauty? That’s kinda dark.
Alexander does a great job of exploring the different possible sociological and economic reasons for the (apparent) aesthetic gap between contemporary architecture and that of the past: increased labor costs making artisanal work uneconomic, widespread availability of beautiful things leading to something’s being aesthetically inaccessible becoming a better signal of fanciness/class, maybe today’s buildings actually are more beautiful than buildings of the past and most of just have bad taste, etc. Commenters on the post also point out a potential selection bias where the old buildings that have stuck around are just the most beautiful and most significant. All interesting and plausible hypotheses.
Suppose architecture today, for whatever reason, is genuinely less beautiful than it used to be or could be. What do we do with that information? To what extent should we be preoccupied with increasing the beauty of the world?
Beauty is an evaluative concept like virtue or justice – we use it to describe how “good”, in some sense, we think something is. A just society is better than an unjust one, a virtuous person better than a vicious one, and a beautiful painting is better than an ugly one. A weird thing, though, is that it would be almost oxymoronic to ask “to what extent should we be preoccupied with making society more just”. It feels almost definitional that we should care about justice. But, I think we can meaningfully ask the equivalent question about beauty. You probably didn’t think I ended the last paragraph with a self-defeating question! So, though we can use “beautiful” as a term of evaluation like we use virtuous or just, beauty as a concept seems to lack some of the force of those other evaluative concepts.
I think the reason beauty seems to have less force than justice, for example, is because we are less convinced that we should produce art than we are convinced that we should live in a society. It’s not like we think a boring movie is as good as a fascinating movie. To the extent that we are seeing something as art, we do apply the standards of beauty to it in the same way that to the extent that we are thinking about how society ought to be, we apply the standards of justice. The difference is that figuring out how to live together as a society seems like a fundamentally important activity to us, so the standard by which we evaluate that activity (justice) seems more important. Art, on the other hand, seems less important to us. As a society, I do not think we are convinced that it is fundamentally important that we create authentic testaments to our values and experiences that demonstrate our various technical abilities1. If someone is trying to do that stuff, we will judge them on how beautiful their work is. But because we discount the broader activity, the standards that apply to it seem similarly less important to us. This is why Alexander’s post comes off as a curiosity instead of a urgent call to action in a way that a post about human rights violations would not.
You might empirically disagree that our society (however one defines that) cares less about artistic expression (however one defines that) than some historically average society (however one defines that). Hard issue to litigate. But, I think it’s potentially interesting to put the empirical question aside and just ask point blank: how much should we prioritize art? How much does art matter?
We seem to value artistic achievement in other cultures. I was reading John Keay’s “China: A History”, and the author noted that though the Song dynasty only ruled over a fraction of the territory previous dynasties were able to unite through military and diplomatic excellence, the Song era is seen as a golden age because it led to the creation of a bunch of great art. Indeed, from the Wikipedia page “Culture of the Song Dynasty”: The Song dynasty (960–1279 AD) was a culturally rich and sophisticated age for China. It saw great advancements in the visual arts, music, literature, and philosophy. If, when looking at Chinese history, we really think the period where the empire declined but the books were really good is especially admirable, maybe we should elevate the status of art in our society2. After all, as Tanner Greer has noted, if we are judging ourselves by our cultural output, we do not seem to be doing all that well.
One objection to society’s prioritizing art would focus on resource constraints. The effective altruist version of the argument is that it is morally wrong to donate to support a museum or opera when such funds could be used to prevent someone dying from malaria. A libertarian version of the argument would say that the government is only justified in using resources that advance security, welfare, and freedom, leaving the use of tax revenues for supporting the arts outside of what the government can legitimately do. Keay describes an extreme version of the trade-off in early China:
While members of the ruling clans frequented the great buildings whose pounded earth foundations testify to ambitious architecture and gracious living, the black-haired commoners lived in covered pits, used crude clay utensils, and laboured in the fields with Stone Age tools of wood and flint. Malnutrition has been noted in many skeletons. Leisure must have been rare, insubordination fatal. Cultural excellence came at a price in Bronze Age China; the bright burnish of civilisation was down to the hard rub of despotic power
Though there may be fertile ground to cover in exploring how art should trade-off with other social priorities, I want to bracket even that conversation. Suppose there were no trade-offs. Suppose we live in the world of the Star Trek replicator. John Adams says
I must study politics and war, that our sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. Our sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history and naval architecture, navigation, commerce and agriculture in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry and porcelain.
Is the creation of beautiful art what this is all for? Is that where all of society is headed? Will that redeem us?
Biology
This chart always blows my mind. You’ll notice that the Y-axis is a log scale and the white line represents Moore’s law, which enabled the computer revolution of the last 50ish years.
We’re going to do some awesome, weird, crazy stuff with DNA in the next few decades. Stay tuned.
Does that work as a definition of art?
One counterpoint here is that may not we admire the Song more than the more diplomatically/militarily skilled dynasties. Rather, the Song may just have more to offer us. Civilizations that create stories or images that we can appreciate today are more directly valuable to us than a once great civilization that did not leave such durable goods.