Refinement Culture (2020)
paulskallas.substack.com
paulskallas.substack.com
edit: typo left in for reflexive humor
1. Sports. Specifically, basketball, swimming, and gymnastics. Pretty much every community of any reasonable size has a community pool and a community basketball court. There are at least 6 basketball courts and 3 lap pools within a 10 minute drive of my house -- that I know of! -- and all get regular use. Gymnastics is also reasonably popular.
2. Logo design. I'd wager there are way more logo designers today than ever before. Also, this was not a compelling example IMO.
3. Cars. This one is more complicated, but it's really safety regulations that push homogeneity. First, I'll assert that sacrificing participation for fewer bodies splattered across the pavement is a good thing. And, second, again, that's probably a false choice -- I'd wager that there are a larger total number of people designing/making/modifying cars today than ever before. Maybe even a larger percentage of the population (thanks, youtube).
This works for other examples too. E.g., climbing will be added to the next Olympics. The Olympic versions of the sport are what I would call extremely refined, but climbing is more popular than ever.
When TONS of people do a thing, and the rewards for doing it well are reasonably good, that is when you get refinement.
That's a great quote to describe the meme stock phenomena.
>In human relationships we can't optimize without becoming greedy selfish unethical crooks. And in commerce we prefer relations to transactions, ready to support the local butcher because we feel we are part of a community and we are not alone --we are paid back with a smile and someone who says hello in the street. Indeed the central flaw in optimization is thinking that "everything else" ceases to exist and makes people think the individual, not the collective, is the true unit --when such thinking blows up the system. We humans are punished when we try to optimize, as if we suddenly ceased to be humans.
Another customer was identified as driven by service, banter, tradition, speed, familiarity etc.
It's all relationship.
I disagree. I optimize for myself AND the people around me. That is because I don't feel good when I have everything and others have nothing.
> we are optimized enough for survival already
Survival up to reproduction age, and maybe a bit more for raising grandkids. Past that, everything is our own making - we haven't ever lived so long, and the current epidemic of heart disease and cancer is as a result of never-before-seen ages and chemical substances - like the Standard American Diet.
True. But most try to make sure that they have just a little bit more than anybody else around them.
How much do you optimize for the people around you? Do you spread things between yourself and others equally, or optimize that everyone still get some, but you still get most?
I don't mean that as a challenge or attack. It's a genuine question.
I guess my main gripe was that a lot of your thesis can be explained by trend. Women looking like Kardashian is simply no different than looking like Sophia Lauren in a bygone era. AirBnB's being sameish? Go back to the 70s and notice the uniformity of interior design with plywood, rockwalls, bright orange vinyl, etc. Brand mascots being smoother and slicker - again - just reifying the values of our era in the same way the original mascots reflected the masculine values of their day.
As for your broader argument about refinement (itself a clumsy descriptor for all this) - is this really anything new? Hasn't optimisation been the fundamental constant since humans started doing stuff?
> Now the game has shifted to 3-point shooters and players who drive to the basket for close shots. How did this happen? Almost every team now has an NBA analytics department in the front office.
This is minimizing the effect of the rules changes in the NBA that have occurred over the past 20 years to restrict defensive players and protect shooters. The basketball of the 2020's is a different game from the basketball of 90's.
For consideration:
Rules Changes: https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:bRnr3x...
Analysis: https://sidelinesources.com/the-defensive-rule-change-that-s...
I wonder what rule change in baseball could fix this, along the lines of the basketball shot clock. From a business perspective, the leagues as a whole should be refining that instead.
Up to a point, anyway, given that gladiatorial combat to the death would probably be a huge draw. "Next on ESPN, The Hunger Games XXIII. Stay tuned!" Maybe we're already evolving in that direction with the popularity of competitions like "Alone" and the battle royales on Twitch.
As for your suggestion that we ought to optimize the rules themselves (i.e. so that players and teams end up playing in the way that we want), I'm skeptical of this. I have a feeling that, whatever rules we adopt, optimization of the sort in question is liable to produce the same sorts of distortions.
Individual sports should be more resilient to refinements, because more capable athletes can do a larger diversity of moves. But that also won't last forever, at some point people will get enough flexibility that they are able to do the optimal performance for each modality, and then all competitions will be the same there too. (Muscle based modalities are mostly there already.)
It’s a movement to a monoculture which, in every context, increases risk of failure. Plus it’s boring.
Edit: part two of the essay expresses this risk well: “… systems cannot really optimize; optimization leads to nonlinear increase in hidden risks which invariably blows up the apparatus.”
Such as: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/03/15/what-happens-w...
Rather than lamenting the loss of baseball, you can go and find another sport that is more immature, scrappier, and so on. If pop music is predictable then find a music genre that is less well known.
The key is to look to where the money is, and then go elsewhere.
> These minimal improvements in each phone are indistinguishable to the average person. It's still 2007 we are stuck. All they can do is add another camera to the back. Refining.
It's kind of interesting that all of the examples lie in mass culture. Sports. Phones. Marketing. Cars.
Writing is covered in Part 2:
> It managed to get the top of Hacker News without anyone realizing it wasn’t a real person writing it [GPT-3 did].
https://paulskallas.substack.com/p/refinement-culture-c1b
Even so, writing that appears on the front page of HN is not likely to be too far out of the bounds of normal. That's the whole idea.
What all of these phenomena have in common is mass market selection pressure. You have a thing that needs to appeal to the largest possible audience.
Is it any surprise that the things that pop out the other end of this Darwinian selector tend to look the same? To be a little too optimized? To lack personality or quirkiness?
If you want to see counterexamples, look at any niche community. They're all over the Internet. Some of them surfaced during the last US presidential election, to the shock and horror of the masses. These communities seem to be growing in number, and exploring ever more exotic norms of behavior, aesthetics, spirituality, and ground truth.
Of course Fedor is no body-builder, but 80% of males on the planet would probably find it very hard to reach Fedor's physique, even if they trained as hard as he must have.
Anyway Fedor became legendary for his skill and his technique, not his physique. In the olden days of MMA, when men fought like men, in the ring, rather than like animals in a cage, Fedor made his name by bringing down enemies bigger and stronger than himself in a sport were you don't win on points; and also of course for exhibiting something that approached chivalry and honour, as much as such can be found in any sport where two grown men turn each other's face to mush for a crowd's entertainment.
I digress. Fedor's is not the ideal male body. The ideal male brain, maybe - for a time of war, certainly. But he's a professional fighter and most males aren't. Holding his body up as the ideal male physique is committing the same sin of unnatural over-otpimisation the rest of the article (very clumsily, I find) supports.
Would love to see the full documentary on this one.
Alt0: Stop optimizing. Unlikely. The incentives will pull agents to optimize.
Alt1: Change the rules of the games. Unlikely to a lesser degree. They did this to hockey relatively recently.
Alt2: Go local. Like the rise of kabbadi in India, going for local sport or local groceries will allow for greater diversity. Somewhat happening.
Alt3: ?
This is the same way ML models are kept from specializing too much, right?
I doubt it. I haven't seen a lot of women done up for work since last March, but this is not my recollection.
> They all look kind of like Kim Kardashian.
Where does this gentleman live?
> Everyone is taking vitamins now.
Perhaps in the neighborhoods where the women all look kind of like Kim Kardashian.
Funny the author brings up the Olympics because I always complain that the most aesthetically pleasing figure skating runs never win because they aren't crammed wall to wall with "technical requirements". Also re: baseball, I wonder how many more ads there are today?
It's tempting to think that the "refinement culture" that Skallas is talking about, which encompasses everything from hyper-optimized athletic training, to corporate mascots rebranded for sex appeal, is similarly motivated by what is, at base, just capitalism.
The author fails to provide any shape to this. He doesn't describe what refinement culture is. It's a list disconnected changes. I don't know what he's trying to say other than "I don't like how some things change". An AI may have written a better article (if this wasn't already AI generated).
Or not enough depending how one interprets information