Why effort scales superlinearly with the perceived quality of creative work

One thing I’ve learned over decades of home/DIY projects is it’s usually better to intentionally target a small overlap/reveal rather than trying to have two materials match perfectly.

If you have a piece of door trim that exactly matches the piece behind, any imperfections or subsequent wood movement will be unsightly. If you instead target a 1/4” reveal, imperfections and slight wood movement are wildly less noticeable.

This is “build so the 1/32” imperfection/movement doesn’t matter at all” rather than trying to halve or quarter it. (If you can make something monolithic after attaching, such as a plaster wall, you don't have to do this, but wood furniture and trim often has these intentional offsets.)

I don't think the phenomenon you're describing is a result of the amount of effort put into the piece.

As my old art teacher used to say, "You work on something and it gets better and better and then it turns to shit."

"But there's a point where extra effort makes the work less good."

This happens frequently in mixing and mastering audio tracks. You pile up incremental changes that all seemed good at the time. Then you go back and listen to a recording from 20 revisions ago and it sounds better than your current "best" effort.

I just saw Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass in concert last night (he's 90 and can still play that horn!) and one of the things he talked about was recording his vocals for This Guy's In Love With You written by Burt Bacharach and Hal David. He's a great musician but not much of a trained singer, and he said when he got into the studio, he sat down and did a relaxed first practice take, expecting he'd go and record one "for real".

Instead, they told him his first take was absolutely perfect - and it went on to be Bacharach/David's first #1 hit song.

Sometimes you get lightning in a bottle, and you just don't mess with it because it's perfect even in its imperfections.

So i can only speak from my own experience of the last 5 years of trying (and often failing!) to accurately copy or otherwise create various drawings.

Very rarely do I start completely from scratch, but usually adjust the drawing so much that maybe I should have. I wonder if I tracked the adjustments if I would find every line was redrawn in some cases.

Thing is, it is hard to see what part is 'off' until most of the other parts are right. Especially with highly symmetric drawings, where symmetries appear gradually as the whole thing comes together.

From my very limited experience with art, it's more often the case that a work in progress creation is abandoned and then taken a stab at anew later than trashed and restarted. Or it is iterated on to a degree that it is not meaningfully different from a full restart.

I have a bit more experience with software and the only reason for why we don't plan throw one away is because it costs more money and the market pressure on software quality is too low to make stakeholders care. In my personal hobby coding, I often practice this (or do what I described above with art which is closer to abandoning until inspiration strikes again at which point a blank slate is more inviting). The closest thing professionally I get is a "spike" where I explore something via code with the output not being the code itself, but the knowledge attained which then becomes an input to new code writing.

When programming stuff as a hobby, I do always plan to throw one away.

The first one is where I learn my lessons and write enough spaghetti until I fully understand the problem.

Then I delete the first one, and start over with the lessons learnt.

When I was a kid, I obsessed over getting a picture right the first time. But as I got older, I learned to do subject studies to refine tricky details before committing them to a larger piece.

If you ever get the chance to see the personal effects of a famous artist, most have piles and piles of sketches and studies they've done while prepping for a larger piece.

Hmm...a lot? For a complex work, you'll sometimes do some number of sketches and studies and drawing and underpaintings...Lots of things get tried/discarded/modified before you land on a final painting.

> Draw 50

For me, "draw 50" series is about letting loose, NOT about skill. On the contrary, it's about exploring the space of all the different ways a prompt can be worked with in an UN-literal manner. Overall drawing facility will improve merely as a byproduct. The ability to be whimsical and exploit drawing flaws, erm, deliberately, is the real prize.

Different from "limbering up" exercizes like drawing your hand - where you do one at the beginning of a session just because it gets you started and in the flow without having to think or pick a "real" topic. (A similar idea is to leave some already decided work mid-done: when you arrive in the morning you can work on that and limber up and do something useful without having to think clearly yet.)

Different from thumbnails which are about picking a direction.

Pro artist here.

I trash and restart sketches that took a few minutes to do at most. It's very rare for me to get more than an hour or two in and discard it, I've explored and found a solid foundation long before I put that much work in.

If I was working in a studio environment there's the risk of things like "I spent a couple weeks painting that bg and animating that scene and it was absolutely gorgeous but it got cut when the we took a good hard look at the remaining budget and total runtime and cut the entire sequence it was part of" but that's another matter.

The Draw 50 process is solid. The classical techniques I learnt in training for animation are similar.

In art, while there are mistakes that can really make a drawing "wrong", there is a much wider array of valid end-states. Which is why Generative AI managed to make art way before it managed to write code.

An example of this is Bob Ross' school of incorporating mistakes into the piece. Surely it's something that would fly way less in some types of drawings like anatomical ones, but especially when the motif is fantastical or even abstract, there's fewer possible mistakes to make, so there's less reason to throw something away.

With black ink on paper, quite a few. With oil, less. It is part of the medium: how much is a flash of intuitive certainty and how much is slower planning and execution.

maybe if you had put up more effort polishing it it wouldn't have hit the front page :)

Your first line assumes that `q` fails to refer to an objective property. The `e^q` space isn't quality, as much as `e^t` isnt temperature (holding the property we are talking about fixed). Thus the comment ends up being circular.

Right, but there's no point in repeating the exact same sequences unless you are practicing, in production you always do novel stuff, in both programming and drawing. This is unlike other disciplines like music or carpentry.

Music is the same way, especially with improvisation. When you're improvising, you don't make stuff up entirely from scratch - you glue together all the little bits you have in your toolbox to make something new. That's why we endlessly practice scales, arpeggios, learn new songs, copy others' licks, etc.

Why do you think half the keyboard/organ solos in classic rock songs sound like jazzed up versions of Bach and Mozart? That's what they had learned as kids or in music school before going on to make rock and roll.

The abstract is some of the worst writing I've read in a while. Trying to sound so very smart while being incapable of getting your point across. This whole article reeks of pretentiousness.

Hate to comment on the medium or writing style instead of the content but you're not alone. I understand the terms in the article in isolation or used in other fields, but it seems like the author is using a lot of technical metaphors. Or maybe I'm not their sophisticated audience.

"The last 10% take 90% of the time"

The author had a shower thought. It was poorly explored, poorly argued and deliberately packaged in complex language to hide the lack of substance. The bibtex reference at the end is the cherry on top.

I had to think way too hard about what the author was trying to say. It smacks of an attempt at precise language, yet the subject matter is not precise at all. The author commits a Paul Grahamism, assuming their personal experience is generalizable and uniform.

Certainly, some artists work in the way they describe. Maybe even "most", who knows. But there are plenty of artists that do not. I've known plenty of artists to go straight to the detail in one corner of their piece and work linearly all the way across and down the canvas. I don't know how they do it, it certainly doesn't work for me, but obviously different people work in different ways.

This kind of article is why people read comments first today.

It's such a simple idea. And it already has a name, diminishing returns. I don't know what prompted this article but it wasn't insight.

I think you're just not the audience.

Changing the words is going to lose some of the low-amplitude frequencies but I'll try.

It's a model for why (call the following X) things get harder when you try to make them more perfect. Let's take X for granted.

You can ask yourself "why is X true?". One model you could have for this is the "finishing touches" model: as a thing gets closer to perfection, identifying imperfections and rectifying them is harder simply out of search constraints (the less of something the harder they are to find).

Another model you could have is the "dimensional model". A thing is great when it's great along many axes. The more dimensions you add, the harder it is to search in them for perfection. Related: the curse of dimensionality.

And here he posits a new model, the "resolution model": the finer the look at what is good, the more 'options' you have at each stage to choose from; it's not just that you make the broad and then refine within, but that you are actually building the refined thing from the beginning.

He then tries to show how some kinds of creation tolerate movement in the parameter space better.

No model is perfect, so each of these ideas captures some attribute of the difficulty and maps it to a mental structure that is more easily manipulable by the modeler.

The typical owl drawing is a few circles and then the more owly bits, and then the feathers on the owly bits, and then the shadows on the feathers on the owly bits. And this is a method to reduce the kind of problem he's talking about. But if you want to make the perfect owl, perhaps there is an element of making your circle just so, already accounting for the shadows on the feathers on the owly bits before any of the precursors are made.

Anyway, this is imperfect because I am necessarily shaving off the hair on the ball to show you it's spherical. And his entire model is that the hair determines the ball.

I follow a few landscape photographers on YouTube and really enjoy watching them go out into the field (whether it's an actual field or mountain or beach). They've got their art (at least their own style) so dialed in, that the technical details, the subject, the composition, those are almost a forgone conclusion. What matters at that point is light. And light is luck. The difference between an average image and an outstanding one lies in something beyond their control.

And when fortune smiles on them, they get positively giddy.

I really appreciate people who understand that they have to meet luck half way. Even though they've spent hours upon hours upon hours honing their craft, the thing that puts them over the hump is both unpredictable and uncontrollable.

No you have an equal number of options (minor and major are effectively transpositions/rotations...e.g. the chord progressions are "m dim M m m M M" for minor (m-minor, M-major, dim-diminished) chord progression, vs "M m m M M m dim" for major).

The post is likely getting to the point that, for english-speaking/western audiences at least, you are more likely to find songs written in C major, and thus they are more familiar and 'safer'. You _can_ write great songs in Em, but it's just a little less common, so maybe requires more work to 'fit into tastes'.

edit: changed 'our' to english/western audiences

> Does picking E minor somehow give you fewer options than C major (I'm not a musician)?

Short answer: No. No matter what note you start on you have exactly the same set of options.

Long answer: No. All scales (in the system of temperament used in the vast majority of music) are symmetrical groups of transpositions of certain fundamental scales.[1] These work very much like a cyclic group if you have done algebra. In the example you chose, E minor is the "relative minor" of G Major, meaning that if you play an E Aeolean mode it contains all the same notes as G Major), and G major gives you the exact same options as C Major or any other Major Scale. What Messiaen noticed is that there are grouped sets of "Modes of limited transposition" which all work this way. So the major scale (and its “modes”, meaning the scales with the same key signature of sharps or flats but starting on each degree of the major scale) can be transposed exactly 11 times without repeating. There are 3 other scales that have this property (Normally these are called the harmonic minor, melodic minor and melodic major[2]). There are also modes of limited transposition with only 1 transposition (the chromatic scale), 2 (the whole-tone scale), 3 (the "diminished scale") and so on. Messiaen explains them all in that text if you're interested.

[1] This theory was first written out in full in Messiaen's "The technique of my musical language" but is usually taught as either "Late Romantic" or "Jazz" Harmony depending on where you study https://monoskop.org/images/5/50/Messiaen_Olivier_The_Techni...

[2] If you do "classical" harmony, your college may teach you the minor scales wrong with a descending version that is just a mode of the major scale. You may also not have been taught melodic major but it's awesome. (By “wrong” here, I mean specifically Messiaen and Schoenberg would say it’s wrong because a scale is a key signature/tonal area and so can’t have different notes when a melody ascending from descending. If there are two sets of different notes, Messiaen would say they are two scales and I would agree.)

It...depends.

If you're working in a continuous environment rather than discrete (choirs and strings can fudge notes up or down a bit, but pianos are stuck with however they're tuned), you'll often find yourself wanting to produce harmonies at perfect whole-number ratios -- e.g., for a perfect fourth (the gap between the first and second notes in "here comes the bride") you want a ratio of 4:3 in the frequencies of the two notes, and for a major third (the gap between the first and second notes in "oh when the saints, go marching in...") you want a ratio of 5:4. Those small, integer ratios sound pleasing to our ears.

Those ratios aren't scale-invariant though when you move up the scale. Here's a truncated table:

Unison (assume to be C as the key we're working in): 1

Major Second (D): 9/8

Major Third (E): 4/3

However, E is also a major second above D, so in the key of D for a "justly tuned" instrument, you would want the ratio D/E to also be 9/8. Let's look at that table though: (4/3)/(9/8) is 32/27 -- 5.3% too big (too "sharp").

When tuning something like a piano then where you can't change the frequency of E based on which key you're playing in, you have to make some sort of compromise. A common compromise is "equal temperament." To achieve scale invariance in any key you need an exponential function describing the frequencies, and the usual one we choose is based on 2^(1/12) since an octave having exactly twice the fundamental frequency is super important and there are 12 gaps in normal western music as you move up the scale from the fundamental frequency to its octave.

Doing so makes some intervals sound "worse" (different anyway, but it makes direct translations hard) than they would in, e.g., a choir. A major third, for example, is 0.8% sharp, and a perfect fourth is 0.1% sharp in that tuning system.

Answering your question, at first glance you would expect the scale invariance to therefore not limit your choices. Every key is identical, by design.

That's not quite right though for a number of reasons:

1. True equal temperament is only sometimes used, even for instruments like pianos. A tuner might choose a "stretched" tuning (slightly sharpening high notes and flattening low notes) or some other compromise to make most music empirically sound better. As soon as you deviate from a strict exponential scale, you actually live in a world where the choice of key matters. It's not a huge effect, but it exists.

2. Even with true equal temperament or in a purely vocal exercise or something, there are other issues. Real-world strings, vocal folds, etc aren't spherical cows in a frictionless vacuum. A baritone voice doesn't sound different just because their voice is lower, but because of a different timbre. When you choose a different key, you'll be moving the pitch of the song up or down a bit, exercising different vocal regions for singers, requiring different vocal types, or otherwise interacting with those real-life deviations from over-simplified physics. Even for something purely mechanical like piano strings, there's a noticeable difference in how notes resonate or what overtones you expect or whatnot. Changing the key changes (a little) which of those you'll hear.

3. Related to (2), our ears also aren't uniform across the frequency spectrum, and even if they were our interpretations of sounds also depends on sounds we've heard before, leading to additional sources of variation in the "experience" of a slightly lower or slightly higher key.

I'm personally a little frustrated with these music theory answers. Trust me folks, these answers are nearly impossible for a non-musician to understand (and even as a musician it's a bit impenetrable).

E minor gives you the exact same amount of options as C major. The options are just shuffled around a little bit. You literally get the same amount of notes in either, just a slightly different set. It isn't any more complex. Listeners aren't going to notice a difference, except one will probably sound happy and one will probably sound sad/angry. The "acceptance volume", to use the blog author's term, isn't any different.

At best, it can change things a little bit for some instruments. For example, with a vocalist, their voice can only go so high. They might be able to hit up to a high C, but not even higher up to an high E. If you're in C major, that's great, the vocalist's highest note (C) is the 'home note' which sounds great (playing a C in C Major makes the song sound like it's 'finished'). If you're E minor, the 'home note' is E, and as mentioned they wouldn't be able to hit that note. So you wouldn't really be able to 'finish' on a high note.

Ultimately, I doubt the author is a musician. It was a strange example to make their point.

We'd be fortunate if everything that gets cited were this short (it certainly often has similar amount of useful information)

If you dislike crunch time, you should be thankful we live in the superlinear world, and not the sublinear world. Imagine how bad the winner take all dynamics would be if 5% extra effort from you resulted in a game that is not 2% but 2 times as good as it would be otherwise.

I would be surprised if anyone perceives quality like that. Like, are you saying that in a situation where there are only two examples of some type of work, it is impossible to judge whether one is much better than the other, it is only possible to say that it's better? What makes you think it works like this?

I mean, I talk like this as well. It's not really intentional. My interests influence the language that I use.

Why is the rationalist movement asinine? I don't know much about it but it seems interesting.

A bit harsh, but I see what you mean. It is tempting to try and fit every description of the world into a rigorous technical straightjacket, perhaps because it feels like you have understood it better?

Maybe it is similar to how scientist get flack for writing in technical jargon instead of 'plain language'. Partly it is a necessity - to be unambiguous - however it is also partly a choice, a way to signal that you are doing Science, not just describing messing about with chemicals or whatever.

Just reading the abstract, I have to agree with you.

no, we need more of this, the opposite of this is Robin Williams destroying the poetry theory book in dead poeta society, the result was weak kids and one of them commited suicide. More technical stuff in relation to art is a good thing, but its expected that anglosaxon people have allergy to this, they think is somehow socialist or something and they need art to be unfefined etc

I have observed it too, it is heavily inspired by economics and mathematics.

Saying "it's better to complete something imperfect than spend forever polishing" - dull, trite, anyone knows that. Saying "effort is a utility curve function that must be clamped to achieve meta-optimisation" - now that sounds clever

If I was going to be uncharitable, I think there is are corners of the internet where people write straightforward things dressed it up in technical language to launder it as somehow academic and data driven.

And you're right, it does show up in the worse parts of the EA / rationalist community.

(This writing style, at its worst, allows people to say things like "I don't want my tax spent on teaching poor kids to read" but without looking like complete psychopaths - "aggregate outcomes in standardised literacy programmes lag behind individualised tutorials")

That's not what the blog post here is doing, but it is definitely bad language use that is doing more work to obscure ideas than illuminate them

I'll be the first to admit I was unable to follow the article because of this.

What diction is "appropriate to the subject matter" is a negotiation between author and reader.

I think the author is ok with it being inappropriate for many; it's clearly written for those who enjoy math or CS.

It's a middle school essay that is trying to score points based on the number of metaphors used. Very unappealing and I wouldn't call it technical.

EDIT: For all the people saying the writing is inspired by math/cs, that's not at all true. That's not how technical writing is done. This guy is just a poser.

To be fair, it's always an artistic choice if you think it is appropriate here or not, but, yeah, this article is a really heavy offender. Reading the "Abstract claim" I caught myself thinking that this word salad hardly makes any sense, but I don't know and am just gonna let it go, because I am not yet convinced that it's worth my time to decipher that.

Also, "asinine contemporary "rationalist" movement" is pretty lightweight in this regard. Making an art out of writing as bad as possible has been a professional skill of any "academic philosopher" (both "continental" and "analytical" sides) for a century at the very least.

lol I cited this exact scene as an example of typical anglosaxon conception of art, now you are crying that art has become shit but any attempt at scientific analysis is taken as a joke when actual poetry is even harder than Code, the amount of data you can compress on a single Word and rhyimes and stuff IS the hardest thing ever, but because you dont want to think someone can do an effort you want the Robin Williams and Dead Poets society to win and make art non scientifically understandable to anyone, if you cant do scientific or technical analysis of art thats your opinión but why the obsession on trashing anyone Who does It?

A teacher told me once that editing poetry is like trying to open a glass jar. Eventually, you have to set it down or you’ll break the thing.

Agreed, that's an elegant conclusion. Thanks for sharing.

PS Usually LLM-generated content is strongly penalized here (and with good reason). But IMHO, when clearly noting it as such, and sharing something worthwhile -- as in this case -- an exception should be made.