Comment by mbforbes | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mbforbes | Hacker News Reader

I've been randomly thinking about this a lot!

One hypothesis I've been kicking around: human brains like detail.

I thought of this on a walk down a (sub)urban city street.

- High detail: I first noticed the variety of plants in just the garden strips between the sidewalk and the street. I was trying to count how many there were, and I quickly lost track. Then I started looking at each individual plant, and the amount of detail is wild---the sheer intricacy and variation in all the parts and stages of growth. Not to mention the colors (OK, and smell and movement).

Then, I looked at the human made objects around me:

- Low detail: Flat concrete road. Flat concrete sidewalk. Flat stairs. All from rectangular tiles. Metal pole handrail.

The houses around weren't much better---boxy shapes, low ornamentation.

While I think it's generally accepted that nature is more pleasing to the senses to be around human-created objects, it made me wonder whether amount of detail is a fundamental aspect of what our brains enjoy.

This rumination gets activated whenever I walk by old ornate buildings or read an article like this.

Relatedly, even low-poly games people find beautiful (Tunic comes to mind) have an extraordinary amount of detail when you dissect the textures and postprocessing effects. I'd share a video but I'm way off track now.

"While I think it's generally accepted that nature is more pleasing to the senses to be around human-created objects"

I would change that to "nature is more pleasing to the senses to be around human mass produced objects"

Human made houses and gardens and various objects can be very beautiful works of art.

But they usually aren't, because it is expensive. A permaculture garden is a joy to walk in, unlike a monoculture field. A handcrafted table with ornaments is beautiful, a common plastic table not so much. And just adding generic details would be cheap as well, but would still be ugly to me. It is not just about details, but the right details in the right pattern that makes objects beautiful and fitting in its place. Ideally also an house is designed to fit its surroundings. Otherwise it looks out of place. (Most do)

So I am really looking forward the robot revolution, that will (hopefully) free us from the need to produce cheap, so we can focus on producing beautiful again.

>So I am really looking forward the robot revolution, that will (hopefully) free us from the need to produce cheap, so we can focus on producing beautiful again.

I envy your optimism.

Architects spend a lot of time doing "detailing", it's inevitable part of design and construction. Most of is simply not very good, or at least average human effort has hard time competing against nature. There's many aesthetically pleasing "tectonics", designs lacking in detail (ornamentation), but delightful in perception. Not that nature is always great, but on average it does feel more pleasing.

I think something can have a lot of detail (granularity) but not necessarily be appealing. I imagine it's more like patterned detail, so fractal patterns which can expand into substantial and endless detail.

This is also why I personally don’t dislike concrete as much when it’s surrounded by plants and/or in a more ruinous state, in the urbex sense. It has more complexity and less predictability.

A book about this came out recently too: https://www.wallpaper.com/architecture/brutalist-plants-book

I’ve wondered if an abundance of processing leads to parts of the brain ‘wanting’ to be utilised at a subconscious level.

Like a bored border collie but it’s the visual cortex

This is how I felt looking at the Saturn V at KSP. The thing is absolutely huge, and the further up the stack one goes the more intricate the vehicle gets. Every millimeter is carefully engineered, for over one hundred meters in length and maybe ten meters in diameter. Then the crazy lander and capsule at the top. The more I examined it, the more I felt that evolved, like it is a part of human evolution.

Wasn’t that the idea behind the baroque? Just look at that intricate ornamentation of everything down to the doorknob.

I wonder if there's a sweet spot of, basically entropy that we desire as it's evolutionarily beneficial.

A vast desert vs. a teeming rainforest, that sort of thing.

Like how I always assumed that we prefer cold water because of alpine streams.

I grew up in the wet, lush, Pacific Northwest. I absolutely loved going to light industrial business parks. Everything felt so clean and orderly by comparison. Just saying, not everyone needs detail.

Thankfully, we have big windows today, so that we can see the nature outside and running water, so that we can have plants inside too. Why would we distract from that with some ornament, that can only be a pathetic imitation of the fractal wealth of detail of nature?

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