Comment by wallflower | Hacker News Reader

Comment by wallflower | Hacker News Reader

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> In the ideal world, the best teachers would be celebrities and their lectures/lessons would be high demand items.

On a boat ride in Brugges, I heard a boat operator/philosopher expound on why it was so that teachers were paid so little, rockstars like Ozzy Osbourne were rich, and famous composers like Mozart died broke.

He said it was a question of network effects and impact. Mozart died broke because of poor money management and the inability to reach a worldwide audience.

An elementary school teacher is only paid a small amount relative to most celebrities because their impact is small. They cannot reach more 10-30 students at a time.

A baseball player is paid millions because he (through cable TV) can impact/entertain many more anonymous people indirectly.

This brings to mind the interesting question of micro-payments and distance learning - could an effective model for rock star professors be implemented, in an effective implementation of feedback-based distance learning?

> This brings to mind the interesting question of micro-payments and distance learning - could an effective model for rock star professors be implemented, in an effective implementation of feedback-based distance learning?

There's another interesting question - what happens to the "not quite rockstar" professors/teachers?

As Sousa pointed out, recorded music reduces the number of people who can make a living playing music. (It may increase the amount of money spent by listeners.)

Note that only some things scale through distribution. Lectures may. Office hours don't. Thesis advising doesn't.

Sousa pointed out, recorded music reduces the number of people who can make a living playing music.

He should have read his Henry Ford. http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext05/hnfrd10.txt

In a little dark shop on a side street an old man had laboured for years making axe handles. Out of seasoned hickory he fashioned them, with the help of a draw shave, a chisel, and a supply of sandpaper. Carefully was each handle weighed and balanced. No two of them were alike. The curve must exactly fit the hand and must conform to the grain of the wood. From dawn until dark the old man laboured. His average product was eight handles a week, for which he received a dollar and a half each. And often some of these were unsaleable--because the balance was not true.

To-day you can buy a better axe handle, made by machinery, for a few cents. And you need not worry about the balance. They are all alike--and every one is perfect. Modern methods applied in a big way have not only brought the cost of axe handles down to a fraction of their former cost--but they have immensely improved the product.

Like the machine-made, to the artisan-made, axe handle, recorded music is vastly superior to live music - especially given today's digital recording and distribution systems. Leveraging mass distribution, a musician today can afford the luxury of honing a fine product. A live performance is rarely a fine product. It is usually middling in quality, and often below middling. It is usually expensive. For those that wish to see as well as hear their music, today, with DVD and Blu Ray, the live performances that are good can be distributed in a high-quality captured form to wide audiences, at low cost.

Sousa was quite aware of Henry Ford. Sousa's point is that superior recorded music pretty much destroyed "music in the small".

Music isn't much like an axe handle. Is teaching?

Don't get me wrong - I think that distributing good lectures is a great thing. Rock-star lecturers will do extremely well and ordinary ones will have to find something else to do.

However, there's more to education than lectures. The question is what happens to the rest and to education as a whole when lectures come through a separate channel.

Music isn't much like an axe handle.

Artisan made:

Instances are produced one at a time. The quality varies wildly and is usually poor. The cost is high.

Machine made:

The design is perfected, and then limitless high-quality copies are made. The cost is low.

What is the relevant difference between axe-handles and music?

Is teaching [much like an axe handle]?

Yes. The above applies to teaching, as well as to music and axe-handles.

there's more to education than lectures. [...] what happens to the rest

Interactive educational software.

distributing good lectures is a great thing.

By the way, lectures are often written by pharmaceutical companies: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pharmaceutical_industry#Controv...

Lecture scripts and even journal articles presented by academic researchers may actually be 'ghost-written' by pharmaceutical companies.

> What is the relevant difference between axe-handles and music?

Music is more than a product -- live performance is a social experience, not just private consumption. People go to see bands live for many reasons other than the rendition of notes they could get from a recording: they flirt with other concert-goers, they experience mistakes and improvisations by the artists, and they drink and dance in public.

Similarly, good teaching is not a solitary or entirely reproducible event. The best teachers I've ever had were the ones who could get students talking to each other, generating and assessing ideas faster than any one pupil could alone. You can't get the same experience reading a textbook or watching time-delayed streaming video of a lecture. I'm not even entirely convinced that online interaction can pull it off, at least in areas like history and the arts, where subjective and emotional arguments are just as critical as hard logic.

> What is the relevant difference between axe-handles and music?

Interaction: calling back to the singer, requesting a song. Fidelity: being right there. Shared experience: being right there with a whole bunch of other excited people.

I've had tremendously emotional experiences listening to recorded music, but none so potent as hearing the same song live.

You might extend this to teaching: a recording of even the greatest lecturer can't answer your question.

Further to the discussion, though: mass production increased the base quality of tools like axes and knives, and improved efficiency. However, if you want something bespoke, mass production doesn't care. I like my semi- and full-custom knives: they were made for me, according to my specifications. Modern tooling can bridge the gap, too, yielding full-custom items of the same quality as mass-produced items.

I think recording music has actually helped the indie scene. More independent bands are able to make a living because they have a wider sphere of influence. They are able to tour more places and get more people to their shows.

It's a lot easier to carve out a small niche if you have access to a lot of people. Lets say that a band's fan base can reliably get x number of their fans to their shows every six months. Well, those fans will bring their friends, and promotions will get more people into the show who think they might be interested in the music. Well, most of those newcomers won't want to see that band has often as the fans do. So a band would get more people if their fans were spread out. because more of the surrounding community would be willing to support.

I personally am not interested some of the concerts that they have had at my college, but I've gone to them before with friends. I'm sure I would not be interested in seeing those artists again if they were local and played more shows.

And if Sousa were right, the country wouldn't now be full of clubs, bars, cafes and concert halls where live music is performed, and there'd be nothing to play on the radio (or, okay, download on Bittorrent). Music scales through distribution.

> And if Sousa were right, the country wouldn't now be full of clubs, bars, cafes and concert halls where live music is performed

Compared to Sousa's time, the country isn't "full" of places where live music is performed. It's practically empty.

In his time, every bar had live music every night. Today, most don't any night, and most of the ones that do only have it on weekends.

Even fairly small companies had bands - big ones had one or more at every facility. I can't think of three established companies that have bands today. (A group of people getting together to jam at the company party doesn't count.)

We may hear more music today, but people heard far more live music before recorded music caught on.

Man, I had no idea. Where'd you hear/read about this?

> Today, most don't any night, and most of the ones that do only have it on weekends.

When I visited Portland, I was amazed at the multiple, majority no-cost free music every night of the week

> When I visited Portland, I was amazed

suggests that your experience in Portland was different from what you are used to.

Some places do have lots of live music. (Nashville and Austin are also big.) However, they're the exceptions these days.

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