“A Sad Heart at the Supermarket”, Daedalus, vol. 89, no. 2 (Spring 1960_64ya)↩︎

“E-books spark battle inside the publishing industry”, Washington Post, 27 December 200↩︎

Surprisingly, the cost of printing a first edition of a book is only about 10% of the publisher’s final wholesale price, and shipping isn’t much more. The money is going into other things. The New Yorker breaks the costs down as follows (emphasis added):

Traditionally, publishers have sold books to stores, with the wholesale price for hardcovers set at fifty per cent of the cover price. Authors are paid royalties at a rate of about fifteen per cent of the cover price. A simplified version of a publisher’s costs might run as follows. On a new, twenty-six-dollar hardcover, the publisher typically receives thirteen dollars. Authors are paid royalties at a rate of about fifteen per cent of the cover price; this accounts for $3.90. Perhaps $1.80 goes to the costs of paper, printing, and binding [$1.80 of $26 is ~7%], a dollar to marketing, and $1.70 to distribution. The remaining $4.60 must pay for rent, editors, a sales force, and any write-offs of unearned author advances. Bookstores return about thirty-five per cent of the hardcovers they buy, and publishers write off the cost of producing those books. Profit margins are slim.

I suspect, as does author Charles Stross (“Why the commercial ebook market is broken”), that book publishers and Amazon are taking a considerable percentage of the ebook revenue, since in this The New Yorker article, Amazon expected a newspaper publisher to agree to give Amazon 70% of the subscription fees; Amazon has monopoly control over the Kindle, and it is reasonable to think that they are similarly demanding of book publishers. From “Priced to Sell: Is Free the Future?”, 2009-07-06, by Malcolm Gladwell:

At a hearing on Capitol Hill in May, James Moroney, the publisher of the Dallas Morning News, told Congress about negotiations he’d just had with the online retailer Amazon. The idea was to license his newspaper’s content to the Kindle, Amazon’s new electronic reader. “They want seventy per cent of the subscription revenue,” Moroney testified. “I get thirty per cent, they get seventy per cent. On top of that, they have said we get the right to republish your intellectual property to any portable device.”

The idea was that if a Kindle subscription to the Dallas Morning News cost ten dollars a month, seven dollars of that belonged to Amazon, the provider of the gadget on which the news was read, and just three dollars belonged to the newspaper, the provider of an expensive and ever-changing variety of editorial content. The people at Amazon valued the newspaper’s contribution so little, in fact, that they felt they ought then to be able to license it to anyone else they wanted.

A Slate article takes the opposite view: that Amazon is losing a great deal of money on each ebook:

Amazon pays the same wholesale price for Kindle books as it does for real books - generally 50% of the list price. For a typical hardback that retails for $26 - say, E.L. Doctorow’s Homer & Langley - Amazon pays $13 and then sells it for $9.99 on the Kindle, taking a $3 loss on each sale. (The longer-term strategy, publishers fear, is that once the Kindle gains [substantial] market share, Amazon will negotiate lower wholesale prices for digital versions.)

I’m using ‘subsidy’ in a broad sense. Intellectual property laws are subsidies; stronger IP law or more vigorous enforcement is more government subsidy of the protected rentiers; universities hiring professors of creative writing or English and enabling them to write their books on sabbaticals or summer vacations, and publishing them at or below cost - those are subsidies as well. Tax breaks are subsidies, etc.↩︎

IP has other effects, some of which directly reduce artistic production, since so much art is based on existing art. This point has been made at length by many authors such as Lawrence Lessig, but a short example from Tyler Cowen’s Good and Plenty:

Legislation in 1976_48ya brought copyright protection to new extremes, namely the life of the author plus fifty years, and for a company seventy-five years from publication or one hundred years from creation, whichever is sooner. The renewal process was eliminated altogether. Over time the large corporations of the entertainment industry have captured Congress in this matter, and the copyright period has now been extended eleven times in the last forty years. The most recent extension was the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act of 1998_26ya, which expanded copyright protection to the life of the creator plus seventy years, rather than fifty. Corporate copyrights also were extended twenty years to a total of ninety-five years, as were copyrights for all works produced before 1978_46ya. The campaign to change these laws was led by Disney, which had feared the forthcoming expiration of copyright on Mickey Mouse and other lucrative cartoon characters.⁶

Copyright can restrict output in other ways as well. Many artists borrow heavily from each other, often without paying royalties or receiving permission. Disney characters are frequently drawn from European fairy tales or American folktales, without payment of any licensing fee. Some of Bob Dylan’s songs are so close to the works of Woody Guthrie that Dylan would lose a lawsuit, had Guthrie received contemporary copyright protection. Of course Guthrie borrowed heavily as well, most of all from blues musicians. This did not stop Dylan, once a populist 1960s radical, from joining the lobbying effort in favor of copyright extension.⁷ Copyright also makes it harder for rap artists to sample music. Looking back into history, many Shakespeare plays draw their plots from other works; Hamlet, for instance, was based on Thomas Kyd’s Spanish Tragedy. Large sections of Chaucer’s poetry are borrowed from other writers, through either translation or paraphrase. Blues, jazz, country music, and rap are all based on widespread borrowing of melodies and riffs, usually without any acknowledgment and certainly without any payment of licensing fees. It is debatable whether these artistic forms could have developed as we know them, had today’s copyright laws been enforced all along.

The examples are legion; from “Buying the Concept of Art” (‘Talking Philosophy’, The Philosophers’ Magazine):

Since I have taught Aesthetics since 1994_30ya, little that occurs in the strange world of art surprises me. One of the more recent trends is the selling of the ideas of artists, as opposed to the selling of an actual work of art. For example, Lawrence Weiner put a $160,000 price tag on his idea of “2 Metal Balls + 2 Metal Rings (Set Down in the Groove).” For the $160,000 you do not get any balls, rings or a groove. Rather, you would receive a certificate that permits you to write the phrase in a room or create/commission the sculpture that you think it happens to describe.

Works, if that term can be used, were also sold by Sol LeWitt before his death. While he did create art objects, he also created “works” that were just vague instructions for creating a piece. For example, “Alternate Yellow Ink and Pencil Straight, Parallel Lines, of Random Length, Not Touching the Sides.”

Tino Sehgal tops both DeWitt and Weiner. Sehgal does not even offer a certificate or set of instructions, he apparently just makes odd things occur and permits no recording of the event. These “works” are sold for cash in front of witnesses, but no documentation is provided. One of his “works”, which was purchased for around $100,000 is the concept of a museum security guard slowly undressing. Naturally, the money does not buy an actual security guard or an undressing, merely the concept as put forth by Sehgal.

Or “Woman Pays $10,000 For ‘Non-Visible’ Work Of Art”:

Franco and Praxis also warn that, “When you contribute to this Kickstarter project, you are not buying a visible piece of art!” Yes, after contributing real money, buyers will not receive any tangible piece of art and will instead be presented with a written description of their purchase. With prices ranging from $1,000 to $,10,000, you might ask yourself, “who would actually willingly donate money for pretty much nothing?” Answer: Montreal web producer, social media marketer, model and actor Aimee Davison.

Davison’s explanation is at least somewhat sensible:

Also, I wanted to note that I bought Franco et al’s art because I want to promote the benefits of bigger brands sponsoring new media artists and social media art (or Internet projects). My patronage is funding Franco’s project but it is equally a sponsorship; it is a marketing tool to publicize my own projects. Sponsoring a social media art project allows a brand or individual to attach their name to a project wherever it appears online, co-create, gain agency and credibility in the social media sphere and share in the buzz, audience, and cultural impact of a work.

cf. broken window fallacy↩︎

The academic literature is mixed; for example, some find little to no detrimental effect to Internet-borne copyright infringement: from “File-Sharing and Copyright”, Oberholzer-Gee & Strumpf 2010_14ya (media coverage):

Data on the supply of new works are consistent with our argument that file sharing did not discourage authors and publishers.² The publication of new books rose by 66% over the 2002^–₅2007_17ya period. Since 2000_24ya, the annual release of new music albums has more than doubled, and worldwide feature film production is up by more than 30% since 2003_21ya. At the same time, empirical research in file sharing documents that consumer welfare increased substantially due to the new technology.

King Richard II↩︎

Or below; I dislike clutter.↩︎

A rate which, if surveys are to be believed, puts me in a quite rarefied percentile; eg. “One in Four Read No Books Last Year” (The Washington Post), and mentions the average for Americans was 4 books a year, and the median among those who read at least one book was 7, roughly 1 every 7 weeks.↩︎

Another writer (Linda Holmes, “The Sad, Beautiful Fact That We’re All Going To Miss Almost Everything”, NPR) considers if you read 2 a week:

If we assume you start now, and you’re 15, and you are willing to continue at this pace until you’re 80. That’s 6,500 books, which really sounds like a lot. Let’s do you another favor: Let’s further assume you limit yourself to books from the last, say, 250 years. Nothing before 1761_263ya. This cuts out giant, enormous swaths of literature, of course, but we’ll assume you’re willing to write off thousands of years of writing in an effort to be reasonably well-read.

Of course, by the time you’re 80, there will be 65 more years of new books, so by then, you’re dealing with 315 years of books, which allows you to read about 20 books from each year. You’ll have to break down your 20 books each year between fiction and nonfiction - you have to cover history, philosophy, essays, diaries, science, religion, science fiction, westerns, political theory … I hope you weren’t planning to go out very much…We could do the same calculus with film or music or, increasingly, television - you simply have no chance of seeing even most of what exists. Statistically speaking, you will die having missed almost everything.

Edward Stourton, “The Year of Reading Differently” 2011_13ya:

All of this has restricted the reading time I have been able to devote to our existing collection of books - the only one of my vows I was really looking forward to. I began by revisiting Evelyn Waugh and Graham Greene, and honesty compels me to admit that I have got no further. Indeed, I find that I am in no great hurry to get further…Here is a cheerful conclusion: on the basis of the experiment to date I am persuaded that, if I have to, I can go on re-reading my existing library without ever getting bored - I estimate I have enough good literature in the house to last me for the rest of my life.

America, and Great Britain. France contributed a little to SF with Jules Verne, and Japan’s SF is copious (but uninfluential). Besides that, further sources of SF can be named on one hand. Poland offers us Stanislaw Lem, Russia has… someone, no doubt. And that’s about it. SF isn’t prolific even in the Anglophone First World, much less the rest of the globe.↩︎

By a rough count of Nebula Award for Best Novel, 14 of the 43 winners were part of some franchise or series of works. To account for Hugos, we double that to 28 for the 2 awards; if each is part of a trilogy, we need to add 84 more works to our reading list, for another 2 years.↩︎

The World as Will and Representation, section 51, footnote 41↩︎

And the reason I was reading Mistborn at all was curiosity as to how his The Wheel of Time novels might go - and Wheel of Time is itself an excellent example of a mediocre work that sucked time that could’ve gone to something better, but which I could not quit because the curiosity would kill me.↩︎

See the later discussion of hyperbolic discounting and experimental results with songs.↩︎

“Your Brain on Fiction”, Annie Murphy Paul 2012_12ya, NYT:

Researchers have discovered that words describing motion also stimulate regions of the brain distinct from language-processing areas. In a study, led by the cognitive scientist Véronique Boulenger, of the Laboratory of Language Dynamics in France, the brains of participants were scanned as they read sentences like “John grasped the object” and “Pablo kicked the ball.” The scans revealed activity in the motor cortex, which coordinates the body’s movements. What’s more, this activity was concentrated in one part of the motor cortex when the movement described was arm-related and in another part when the movement concerned the leg.

The brain, it seems, does not make much of a distinction between reading about an experience and encountering it in real life; in each case, the same neurological regions are stimulated. Keith Oatley, an emeritus professor of cognitive psychology at the University of Toronto (and a published novelist), has proposed that reading produces a vivid simulation of reality, one that “runs on minds of readers just as computer simulations run on computers.” Fiction - with its redolent details, imaginative metaphors and attentive descriptions of people and their actions - offers an especially rich replica. Indeed, in one respect novels go beyond simulating reality to give readers an experience unavailable off the page: the opportunity to enter fully into other people’s thoughts and feelings.

…Raymond Mar, a psychologist at York University in Canada, performed an analysis of 86 fMRI studies, published last year in the Annual Review of Psychology, and concluded that there was substantial overlap in the brain networks used to understand stories and the networks used to navigate interactions with other individuals - in particular, interactions in which we’re trying to figure out the thoughts and feelings of others. Scientists call this capacity of the brain to construct a map of other people’s intentions “theory of mind.” Narratives offer an unique opportunity to engage this capacity, as we identify with characters’ longings and frustrations, guess at their hidden motives and track their encounters with friends and enemies, neighbors and lovers.

It is an exercise that hones our real-life social skills, another body of research suggests. Dr. Oatley and Dr. Mar, in collaboration with several other scientists, reported in two studies, published in 2006 and 2009 [see also their 2008 review], that individuals who frequently read fiction seem to be better able to understand other people, empathize with them and see the world from their perspective. This relationship persisted even after the researchers accounted for the possibility that more empathetic individuals might prefer reading novels. A 2010 study by Dr. Mar found a similar result in preschool-age children: the more stories they had read to them, the keener their theory of mind - an effect that was also produced by watching movies but, curiously, not by watching television. (Dr. Mar has conjectured that because children often watch TV alone, but go to the movies with their parents, they may experience more “parent-children conversations about mental states” when it comes to films.)

Fiction, Dr. Oatley notes, “is a particularly useful simulation because negotiating the social world effectively is extremely tricky, requiring us to weigh up myriad interacting instances of cause and effect. Just as computer simulations can help us get to grips with complex problems such as flying a plane or forecasting the weather, so novels, stories and dramas can help us understand the complexities of social life.”

(See also Kidd & Castano2013 but note that it has failed to replicate in the large Panero et al 2016, which strongly supports self-selection as the mechanism.) Justifying fiction on practical benefits is a powerful justification - if it’s true. But these claims of benefit are a little questionable, being largely correlational. More generally, the question is one of “transfer of learning”: the typical result in psychology is that if you spend time learning or training on something, you will improve substantially on that, improve a little or moderately on things which resemble that closely (“near transfer”), and improve hardly at all on anything else (“far transfer”). So no matter how much of a mental workout you get playing chess, it won’t “transfer” to, say, learning English vocabulary. Anything which might cause far transfer would be unusual and exciting (such as dual n-back), but the task is tantamount to increasing IQ in normal healthy people - a holy grail which remains out of reach half a century later. (Even years of schooling, spending hours a day on a variety of subjects, fails to increase childrens’ IQ more than a few points at best.) So, what does reading fiction transfer to? Does it only lead to “near transfer” like higher WPM or appreciation of literature, or does it also lead to more “far transfer” like better theory of mind and real-life social skills?↩︎

The post “Data On Fictional Lies”, discussing the paper “Hierarchy in the Library: Egalitarian Dynamics in Victorian Novels”. It’s worth noting that things like the Terman sample find that in real life, being Extroverted and low on Agreeableness correlate with success; the latter, at least, is more characteristic of antagonists than protagonists:

Follow-up tests showed a [statistically-]significant Valence * Salience interaction effect on Extraversion (F1,374 = 11.40, p = 0.001) and Agreeableness (F1,374 = 16.65, p < 0.001). On Extraversion, protagonists score [statistically-]significantly lower than antagonists (-0.26 vs. 0.44, F1,377 = 22.18, p < 0.001). Also, protagonists score lower than good minor characters (-0.26 vs. 0.01, F1,377 = 5.57, p = 0.019) and antagonists score higher than bad minor characters (0.44 vs. -0.26, F1,377 = 7.33, p = 0.007). On Agreeableness, protagonists score [statistically-]significantly higher than antagonists (0.37 vs. -1.15, F1,377 = 149.73, p < 0.001), and good minor characters score higher than bad minor characters (0.33 vs. -0.25, F1,377 = 8.34, p = 0.004). Also, antagonists scored [statistically-]significantly lower on Agreeableness than bad minor characters (-1.15 vs. -0.25, F1,377 = 5.57, p = 0.019). Follow-up tests also showed that valence had a [statistically-]significant main effect on Conscientiousness, Emotional Stability, and Openness to Experience. Good characters score [statistically-]significantly higher than bad characters on Conscientiousness (0.17 vs. -0.29, F1,374 = 10.59, p = 0.001), Emotional Stability (0.17 vs. -0.51, F1,374 = 22.10, p < 0.001); and Openness to Experience (0.17 vs. -0.32, F1,374 = 11.88, p = 0.001). In real life, higher levels of Agreeableness, Conscientiousness, and Emotional Stability are generally considered to be desirable, so it is not surprising that good characters score higher than bad characters on these factors. However, Extraversion and Openness in real life are more desirable in some situations and less desirable in others. Why bad characters score higher on Extraversion and good characters, on Openness, is considered in the Discussion section.

“Applied topology and Dante: an interview with Robert Ghrist”, John D. Cook 2010-09-13.↩︎

“…But tragically, some of the world’s strangest movies will never be available on DVD at all. The TCM database estimates that only 4.8% of all films ever made are currently available to the public. Though the Internet has been invaluable in finding strange and forgotten relics, some films, whether through accident, disaster or perceived disinterest, have been lost or temporarily displaced.” –io9, “Weird and Wonderful Movies That You’ll Never Get to See”↩︎

“Pandora’s digital box: Pix and pixels”, quoting Jan-Christopher Horak, Director, UCLA Film and Television Archive.↩︎

Of course, one could argue that there is something uniquely optimal and special about the current existing level of movie production, such that this invisible 95% fall is acceptable but another 95% fall would be cataclysmic. I hope the reader understands that this is a deeply untrustworthy position to take (and they should read the Bostrom link on the ‘status quo bias’) - I’d parody this argument as “oh, that 95% fall is OK because it still leaves us a number of movies which is bigger than some-number-I-made-up-just-now-based-on-the-information-you’ve-provided-me; but another 95% fall, well, that’d just be madness!”↩︎

This seems to go unrecognized sometimes in literary fields, with its close attention to the rare landmarks of literary history; Franco Moretti remarks in pg 3-4 of Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for a Literary History (2005_19ya):

…what a minimal fraction of the literary field we all work on: a canon of two hundred novels, for instance, sounds very large for nineteenth-century Britain (and is much larger than the current one), but is still less than 1% of the novels that were actually published: twenty thousand, thirty, more, no one really knows - and close reading won’t help here, a novel a day every day of the year would take a century or so.

See Everything Bad Is Good for You, and the author’s essay-summary “Watching TV Makes You Smarter”; see also the Flynn effect.↩︎

‘total hours - sleeping hours’, or, 80 years × 365 days × 24 hours = 700,800; 700,800 - (1⁄3 × 700,800) = 467,200.↩︎

“A Girl in a Library”, lines 32-29; The Seven-League Crutches↩︎

“Vast bookstore opens as famed library runs out of space”, BBC News, 2010-10-06↩︎

Their 2010 report is provisional about the 2010_14ya ISBNs, and so I exclude them. Over 2002^–₇2009_15ya, the number of ISBNs per year increased dramatically: 247777, 266322, 295523, 282500, 296352, 407646, 561580, 1335475, and 3092740. Nearly half the total came just from 2009_15ya! In a remarkable testament to the growth of electronic and print-on-demand publishers, Bowker estimates for 2010 that BiblioBazaar accounted for 1,461,918 ISBNs.↩︎

Nor was this the extreme for that period. “Remember when you had to pay 50 bucks for a two-episode VHS tape from Japan, plus shipping? Or, shudder, a hundred dollars to import a LaserDisc for a two-episode OAV that turned out to be total garbage? Those were dark times, my friend.” (Anime News Network)↩︎

Not unreasonable a figure, given how many albums and other works are released every year; from Oberholzer-Gee & Strumpf 2010_14ya:

While album sales have generally fallen since 2000_24ya, the number of albums being created has exploded. In 2000_24ya, 35,516 albums were released. Seven years later, 79,695 albums (including 25,159 digital albums) were published (Nielsen SoundScan, 2008_16ya). Similar trends can be seen in other creative industries. For example, the worldwide number of feature films produced each year has increased from 3,807 in 2003_21ya to 4,989 in 2007_17ya (Screen Digest, 2004_20ya and 2008_16ya). Countries where film piracy is rampant have typically increased production. This is true in South Korea (80 to 124), India (877 to 1164_860ya), and China (140 to 402). During this period, U.S. feature film production has increased from 459 feature films in 2003_21ya to 590 in 2007_17ya (MPAA, 2007_17ya).

pg 281 of Kevin Kelly’s What Technology Wants (2011_13ya).↩︎

From his 2006 interview:

As you can see from my comments that I’m addicted to writing, I love the idea of communicating ideas to other people. I think, in every case, the books that I’ve written were things where I had learned about some phenomenon that I thought was just too good to keep to myself and so I wanted other people to share in the joy of reading it. So it turns out then that I have more than 20 books in print now and that’s, you know, so many that I doubt that there’s anybody in the world who’s read more than half of them. And I sometimes think what tragedy it would be if there were ten people in the world like me because we wouldn’t have time to read each other’s books, you know, it doesn’t scale up.

See also Robin Hanson’s brief essay. “The Myth Of Creativity: Innovation matters, but releasing your inner bohemian isn’t the answer”↩︎

The Nation (1946-02-23); reprinted as “Bad Poets” in Poetry and the Age (1953_71ya)↩︎

To take an obscure recent example; “Sleep Dealer Injects Sci-Fi Into Immigration Debate”, Wired, 2008-01-24:

Sleep Dealer is remarkably topical for a film set in the future (albeit one described by Rivera as taking place “five minutes from now”). Central themes include outsourcing, corporate ownership of water, remote warfare, confessional internet diaries and military contractors who are accountable to no one. It’s the rare political film without any reference to contemporary politics; like Blade Runner and other big-brained sci-fi flicks, it’s about ideas, not selling merchandise. “I love gnomes and goblins and elves,” said Rivera, who’s made a name for himself touring museums and festivals with his award-winning shorts. “But what I’m really interested in is speculative fiction. I wanted to use this film to ask the question, ‘Where are we going?’”…That ironic juxtaposition started Rivera thinking: What if technology could extract the life force from the Mexican population and send it north?

A loaded word, I admit. But fiction is fundamentally lies - stories about things that never were and never will be - and ‘convincing someone to do something they wouldn’t’ve based on lies or rhetoric for some ulterior purpose’ is as good a definition of ‘propaganda’ as I can think of.

The nicer word is ‘inspiration’. (Although one person’s inspired man is another person’s inflamed zealot. Lenin was pretty inspired.) That this is one of the roles of SF has long been acknowledged by authors; Asimov in his 1963_61ya essay “The Sword of Achilles” isn’t clear about whether interest in SF causes scientific achievement or just predicts/correlates with it, but Neal Stephenson in 2011 no longer even feels the need to justify the theory:

In early 2011_13ya, I participated in a conference called Future Tense, where I lamented the decline of the manned space program, then pivoted to energy, indicating that the real issue isn’t about rockets. It’s our far broader inability as a society to execute on the big stuff. I had, through some kind of blind luck, struck a nerve. The audience at Future Tense was more confident than I that science fiction [SF] had relevance - even utility - in addressing the problem. I heard two theories as to why:

1. The Inspiration Theory. SF inspires people to choose science and engineering as careers. This much is undoubtedly true, and somewhat obvious….

NASA seems to agree, sponsoring its own fiction collaborations, much as such an initiative bothers some people, and Neil Gaiman attributes such a belief to Chinese government officials:

Fiction, however, “shows you that the world doesn’t have to be like the one that you live in. Which is an incredibly dangerous thing for the world.” He related a story about being at a science fiction convention in China in 2007_17ya and asking one of the government officials assigned to watch over the proceedings why China was now allowing such a convention. The official answered that while China has a worldwide reputation for being excellent at constructing things that others bring to them, China is not considered inventive or innovative. Through outreach to huge American tech companies like Google, Microsoft, and Apple, the Chinese government discovered that a lot of the individuals in those companies grew up reading science fiction. That, essentially, they were told at a young age that the world wasn’t static, that they could change it, that they could introduce new concepts and inventions. Thereafter, The Chinese government relaxed their control over science fiction stories, and those stories began immediately seeping in to their culture.

William Gibson, in his usual contrarian mode, disdains this claim:

INTERVIEWER: “Do you think fiction should be predictive?”

GIBSON: “No, I don’t. Or not particularly. The record of futurism in science fiction is actually quite shabby, it seems to me. Used bookstores are full of visionary texts we’ve never heard of, usually for perfectly good reasons.”

§41 (as quoted in “Narrowing the circle of thought (George Orwell)”)↩︎

Robin Hanson has a number of good articles on how fiction can very easily mislead us, and that this may be a fundamental fact about the human brain (the ‘Near/Far’ psychology paradigm):

• “Biases of Science Fiction”

• “What Insight Literature?”

• “Disagreement is Near-Far Bias”

• “Beware Detached Detail”

• “BSG is Detached Detail”

• “Against Propaganda”

It’s worth noting that one of the standard ‘jobs’ for prominent science-fiction authors is consulting and helping ‘visualize’ particular scenarios and futures for think-tanks and corporations and government agencies; David Brin has mentioned doing this on more than one occasion, and Karl Schroeder has a degree in that. From his “Science Fiction as Foresight” post:

For about ten years now I’ve been periodically hired to write fictionalized versions of foresight findings. It works like this: mysterious government group A approaches me and tells me they’ve just spent six months researching the future of X (where X is something like “farm equipment” or “Alternatives To The Syringe”). What they’ve got is one or more scenarios, which are basically alternative plotlines for future events. They’d like me to turn these into actual stories, which I’m happy to do. (The most extreme example of this is the book Crisis in Zefra, which I wrote for the Canadian army back in 2005_19ya)…Curiously, when I write scenario fictions I’m not trying to generate new ideas of my own, but rather to represent the ideas that some set of futurists, subject experts, or public panels has already developed. This makes scenario fictions different than SF prototypes…Science fiction is more than just a genre of fiction. Hell, it’s more than just fiction. It’s a mode of thought; because our brains are hardwired and optimized to think in narratives, SF can be seen as a primary means by which we make sense of and plan for the future. By understanding how this process works, we have an opportunity to grow a new branch of SF parallel to but not replacing or displacing the traditional arm-a branch that’s rigorous and methodical and deliberately used to help solve real-world problems. In fact, that’s been happening for a while now (see Johnson’s book); I’m delighted to have found myself in a position to be able to help make it formally recognized.

It’s worth noting that when it comes to anecdotal evidence (like stories) versus factual evidence (like statistics), statistics are preferred when they reinforce one’s current beliefs but anecdotes work better than statistics when the message contradicts one’s current beliefs (Slater & Rouner1996). As one would expect, the less analytic one is, the more one weights random comments and anecdotes (Lee & Jang2010); one wonders if heavy fiction consumers are more likely to be highly analytic or not… To the extent that statistics are vastly more trustworthy then pre-selected anecdotes of dubious veracity, this is a very troubling observation: if there must be an interaction with one’s beliefs, the opposite would be much preferable!↩︎

Gilbert’s original results should be considered modified by Hasson et al 2005 & Richter et al 2009, which replicate the results but with limitations that may or may not render invalid any application to fictional works.↩︎

Appel 2008_16ya offers some background:

There are numerous anecdotes about pieces of fiction shifting people’s worldview. As Strange (2002_22ya) pointed out, Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Beecher Stowe (1853_171ya/1981_43ya) seems to have changed many readers’ beliefs about equal rights. Its publication is even connected to the outbreak of the U.S. Civil War. Apart from the vast amounts of literature on the effects of aggressive media content and pornography, fiction has been widely neglected by mass communication researchers-clearly in contrast to the regularly ascribed impact on individuals and societies. Among approaches aimed at filling this gap, the idea of a “persuasion through fiction” has received the widest attention. A growing body of research has demonstrated profound persuasive effects shortly after recipients encounter fictional stories (Gerrig & Prentice, 1991_33ya; Green & Brock, 2000_24ya; Prentice, Gerrig, & Bailis, 1997_27ya; Strange & Leung, 1999_25ya; Wheeler, Green, & Brock, 1999_25ya) and an even higher impact after a 2-week delay (Appel & Richter, 2007_17ya). People who read about a fictional character who quit school because of personal problems tend to attribute school dropouts to individual circumstances in the real world as well (Strange & Leung, 1999_25ya), whereas people who read about someone who thinks that wearing a seat belt is unsafe are less convinced about wearing seat belts themselves, and so forth (eg. Appel & Richter, 2007_17ya; Prentice et al 1997_27ya). Recipients seem to learn whatever “facts” fictional narratives teach them.

…Newsmakers and other producers of nonfictional television content may be tempted to produce just worlds because viewers appreciate “good news” (Schmitt & Maes, 2006_18ya; Zillmann, Taylor, & Lewis, 1998_26ya), but content analyses point in a different direction. Research indicates that nonfictional programming contains a lot of immoral, antisocial behavior that has no negative consequences. In a majority of cases, those immoral acts have no consequences at all and sometimes even positive ones (Potter, Warren, Vaughan, Howley, Land, & Hagemeyer, 1997_27ya; Stone, Hartung, & Jensen, 1987_37ya). Potter et al. stated that the low rates for punishment of antisocial acts in nonfictional programming correspond to the lack of punishment in the real world (as represented in criminology statistics). But in contrast to real-world statistics, people do believe that antisocial acts have serious consequences (as, eg. indicated by people’s evaluations of police records). Because nonfictional television as well as real-life statistics cannot account for this widespread belief in fair consequences, it may be the entertaining fare of fictional narratives that cultivate just-world beliefs…A big part of (early) studies related the BJW to the evaluation of victims of undesirable incidents, like rape, accidents, cancer, or HIV infection. People high in the BJW tend to look down on victims and attribute the reasons for their misfortunes to the victims themselves (cf. Montada, 1998_26ya). People high in the BJW have the positive illusion (cf. Lerner, 1980_44ya) that social situations are under one’s own control or that they are at least predictable (Lipkus, Dalbert, & Siegler, 1996_28ya).

…It has been shown in the United States that reality-based crime shows (like Cops, L.A.P.D.) are related to fear in the audience (Dowler, 2003_21ya; Oliver & Armstrong, 1995_29ya). Until recently, this kind of programming has not been available in major German language television stations. Concerning genre-based cultivation processes, interviews with German adolescents imply that the tabloid television news (Boulevardmagazine), which may be labeled as infotainment (containing a mixture of celebrity gossip, animal stories, and crime news), cultivate a mean- and scary-world view (Eggert, 2001_23ya).

In another example, the meta-analysis Winterbottom et al 2008 found that medical narratives (especially in the first-person) influenced decisions more than the truer statistical information.↩︎

Which, ironically, can lead to perceiving real people as fake! And also less relevant to one’s life than the fakes, oddly enough. One odd study I found was on how superheros influence body perception; men liking Batman or Spider-Man apparently makes them feel stronger and more manlier even though the superheros are so much more fit & muscular, and similarly for women & models.↩︎

Introduction to The Incarnation of the Word of God↩︎

“Religion and Literature” 1935, from Selected Prose of T.S. Eliot ed Kermode 1975_49ya, pg97-106↩︎

On the other hand, Switzerland is, adjusted for size, one of the most scientifically prolific countries in the world. Albert Einstein was a Swiss citizen, incidentally.↩︎

And while the situation has gotten better since C.P. Snow’s day, can we really say there’s so much cross-fertilization as to prove this externality, or prove it of sufficient magnitude?↩︎

See “Which universities lead and lag? Toward university rankings based on scholarly output”, Ramage 2010_14ya.↩︎

Various disciplines have many papers and essays arguing that researchers deliberately inflate their paper counts to meet publishing requirements, pursue unproductive but publishable avenues, and are so lacking in rigor that many (or even most) results are wrong - so it would be difficult to offer any citations for such a broad claim. Mencius Moldbug has written a meandering & funny essay/blog post about what is wrong with the field of computer science, however, that conveys this general vein of thought.↩︎

One way of trying to measure productivity per researcher is to examine what experts/researchers in that area consider worth mentioning. Charles Murray examines encyclopedias and biographical dictionaries up to 1950_74ya in Human Accomplishment and finds, once one corrects for the explosive growth of the human population in recent centuries and the even more explosive growth in urbanized educated people, a decline.

Less historically, one can simply look at how many published peer-reviewed papers go uncited for 5 years. If a paper is not cited once in that period, even just as part of a review, then one begins to wonder whether it is a good paper; and if a field publishes a lot of such papers, one begins to wonder about that field’s researchers. There are many interesting statistics in this vein. From “The Rise and Fall of Uncitedness”, by Charles A. Schwartz:

…55% of scientific articles do not receive a single citation within five years of publication. A few weeks later, another report in Science by the same research body, the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI), noted still higher rates of uncitedness for the social sciences (75%) and humanities (92%)….Among the new findings eventually produced, but not published, was the rate of uncitedness in library and information science (LIS). This rate turned out to be 72%…The popular press treated this issue with cavalier remarks, such as one attributed to a professor: “If the bottom 80% of the literature just vanished, I doubt if the scientific enterprise would suffer.”’…Against ISI’s initial 55% uncitedness rate for the physical sciences, one study found a 5% rate for astronomy and an 8% rate for physics. And against ISI’s initial 75% uncitedness rate for the social sciences, another study found a 9% rate for sociology.

There are quite a range of uncited estimates; to give just some ranges that particularly struck me, even after making allowance for all the possible confounding factors:

• physical sciences: 55-14%

  1. 72-34% engineering

  2. 55-26% math

  3. chemistry: 28% (nuclear chemistry 17%; applied chemistries: 78%)

• social: 75-48%

  1. international relations 83-53%

  2. political science 90-58%

• humanities: 98-93%

  1. theater, American literature, architecture 99-95%

  2. religious studies 98-93%

Mark Bauerlein’s 2011 report found that:

Once those books and essays are published, the vast majority of them attract scant attention from other scholars - for example, of 16 research articles published by University of Vermont professors in 2004_20ya, 11 of them received 0-2 citations, three received 3-6 citations, one received seven citations, and one 11….Of 13 research articles published by current SUNY-Buffalo professors in 2004_20ya, 11 of them received zero to two citations, one had five, one 12. Of 23 articles by Georgia professors in 2004_20ya, 16 received zero to two citations, four of them three to six, one eight, one 11, and one 16….A 2000_24ya book on Gerard Manley Hopkins collected four citations in eight relevant books on the poet published 2007^–₃2010_14ya. A 2003_21ya book on Thomas Hardy garnered one citation in 16 relevant books published 2007^–₃2010_14ya. Of eight books published by Vermont professors 2002^–₃2005_19ya, four of them received zero to 10 citations in subsequent essays, and four received 11 to 20 (four of the top five were studies in film). There are, of course, some breakout items. One book by an Illinois professor collected 82 citations in essays, another one 57.

Some further reading:

• Van Dalen & Klamer 2005_19ya, “Is Science A Case of Wasteful Competition?”

• Redner 1998_26ya, “How popular is your paper? An empirical study of the citation distribution”

• Klamer et al 2002_22ya, “Attention and the art of scientific publishing”

• Mansilla et al 2007_17ya, “On the behavior of journal impact factor rank-order distribution”

“The Prestige Chase Is Raising College Costs”, Frank 2012_12ya:

Researchers have responded as expected to these incentives. But the additional papers they’ve written have added little value. The economist Philip Cook and I found [The Winner-Take-All Society: Why the Few at the Top Get So Much More Than the Rest of Us, Frank & Cook 1996_28ya], for example, that in the first five years after publication, many fewer than half of all papers in the two most selective economics journals had ever been cited by other scholars.

It doesn’t seem likely to improve, as institutions continue to allocate tenure and funding based on metrics like impact factor. From “We Must Stop the Avalanche of Low-Quality Research”, The Chronicle of Higher Education:

Consider this tally from Science two decades ago: Only 45% of the articles published in the 4,500 top scientific journals were cited within the first five years after publication. In recent years, the figure seems to have dropped further. In a 2009_15ya article in Online Information Review, Péter Jacsó found that 40.6% of the articles published in the top science and social-science journals (the figures do not include the humanities) were cited in the period 2002_22ya to 2006_18ya.

Business analysts make the same point (“Reed Elsevier: A Short History of Two Days in July (and Why Investors Should Care)”, Aspesi et al 2012_12ya; BernsteinResearch):

In the past we could not understand why Reed Elsevier opposed OA so much. After all, why not just charge an adequate APC and do without the aggravation of antagonizing librarians and the academic community? We believe we made a major mistake: we treated all journals as equal, while they are not. Exhibit 5 and Exhibit 6 explain what we think is the real underlying issue for the industry (and for Elsevier) - a lot of the articles published are not very relevant. The two exhibits show the readership of articles in life sciences and chemistry, respectively, at 10 UK universities; the top 20-25% of journals account for 75-90% of the readership and the top 50% for about 95%. Conversations with academic librarians suggest they see similar data elsewhere. In other words, half of the articles which are published today are largely ignored by the scientific community, even if the libraries acquire (and pay) them.

Does Elsevier do any better than this? Of course only the company itself, looking at internal data, can know the precise answer. There is, however, evidence that Elsevier is not [substantially] better off. New Mexico State University made available the readership data for two big deals it had discontinued, which included Elsevier (Exhibit 7). The curve looks very similar to that of the UK universities we saw earlier: 10% of journals from major publishers had been accessed at least once a week in the previous year, while more than two thirds had been accessed less than once a month.

To be fair, low readership numbers may be a function of the number of faculty, researchers and doctoral candidates working in a specific discipline. But NMSU, when it went through a second round of titles cutting earlier in 2012_12ya (which did not involve Elsevier titles, since they had been culled in 2010_14ya), involved the faculty to make sure it would not cancel titles of high value to small community. In its information release¹⁰, the library noted that the faculty asked to protect only 5% of the low readership titles: “In May 2012 the Library announced that it would be cancelling 276 journal titles to meet its target amount of $200,000. University faculty contested the cancellation of 14 of the 276 titles, noting the high research value of each. Due to the generosity of the University Administration, the Library has reduced its cancellation list to 261 titles for a total cancellation amount of $167,935. These 261 journal titles show low use (10 or fewer uses), or no use, or cost $100 or more per use”.

Nor are papers/articles the only scholarly productions which have extremely small audiences; conferences and monographs do not draw very many participants. From “University Presses: Balancing Academic and Market Values”, Mary M. Case; ARL: A Bimonthly Report no. 193 (August 1997_27ya):

Since libraries are the main market for scholarly monographs, the decline in the number of books purchased triggered university presses to reduce print runs. While print-runs of 1,000 to 1,500 copies were standard ten years ago, presses are now confronting sales of 400-500 copies. While sales do vary across disciplines and sub-disciplines, these low numbers hold true for even award-winning books in the less ‘popular’ fields.

“Reflections on University Press Publishing”, Bill Harnum:

The numbers are hard to quantify, given the wide variety of subject areas involved, but a fair estimate would be that the average sale of a scholarly monograph has shrunk from 600-700 copies in the 1980s to 300-400 copies in 2007_17ya. This reduction in sales units has led some publishers to increase their number of titles published annually as a means of maintaining their revenues. The phrase, “Flat is the new up” seems to be in vogue, meaning that no sales increase from year to year is the equivalent of the increases we have seen in the past.

Alex Reid, “On the value of academic blogging”:

In my experience, the average audience for a conference presentation is <20.

How much economic growth since the Middle Ages has been due to science & technology, and not solely increased population & resource exploitation? Most of the growth…↩︎

Charles Murray comments, “One of the greatest of Euripides’s surviving works, The Trojan Women, won only second prize in a contemporary competition. We know nothing about the play that came in first.” (pg 277, Human Accomplishment)↩︎

Links as in original.↩︎

He is not the only one diagnosing this slowdown; see composer Glenn Branca’s “The Score: The End of Music” for another lament.↩︎

“Is the internet stifling new music?”, 2009-11-09, BBC News↩︎

One-time, of course. It’s hard to imagine what an on-going cost for in-progress works might be. People dreaming up possible series and being unhappy that they won’t be written? But we hardly are concerned by ‘ten thousand freaks that died in thinking’.↩︎

From the distance of centuries, everything written in the 1600s sounds equally 1600-ish. But there is more intra-group variation in the books of the ‘50s and ’90s then there is inter-group variation. A book from the 1950s can easily date itself, but it’ll be usually through allusions and ideologies, and not the actual words. (Large-scale culturomics studies like Hughes et al 2012 can offer insight on how much writers’ language changes over time and whether it is changing faster or slower, but such studies don’t tell us whether the changes actually matter to enjoyment or whether the changes are real yet irrelevant to our pleasure - a distinction of effect size versus statistical-significance.)↩︎

Professional sports and Olympic sports routinely break world records as they develop ever more effective training & teaching methods, and scour the populace for people capable of historic performance; chess has followed a similar trajectory with Magnus Carlsen becoming a grandmaster at age 13 & peaking - for now - just below his not-too-distant predecessor (and greatest chess player in history), Garry Kasparov. The Dominican Republic is vastly overrepresented in baseball, demonstrating that there is tremendous latent reserves of world-class baseball players in even tiny populations.

Baseball statistician & writer Bill James says in an excerpt from his book Solid Fool’s Gold: Detours on the Way to Conventional Wisdom:

I believe that there is a Shakespeare in Topeka today, that there is a Ben Jonson, that there is a Marlowe and a Bacon, most likely, but that we are unlikely ever to know who these people are because our society does not encourage excellence in literature. That’s my opinion. This observation is nowhere near as gloomy as it might seem. Our society is very, very good at developing certain types of skills and certain types of genius. We are fantastically good at identifying and developing athletic skills - better than we are, really, at almost anything else. We are quite good at developing and rewarding inventiveness. We are pretty good at developing the skills necessary to run a small business - a fast food restaurant, for example. We’re really, really good at teaching people how to drive automobiles and how to find a coffee shop.

We are not so good at developing great writers, it is true, but why is this? It is simply because we don’t need them. We still have Shakespeare. We still have Thomas Hardy and Charles Dickens and Robert Louis Stevenson; their books are still around. We don’t genuinely need more literary geniuses. One can only read so many books in a lifetime. We need new athletes all the time because we need new games every day - fudging just a little on the definition of the word need. We like to have new games every day, and, if we are to have a constant and endless flow of games, we need a constant flow of athletes. We have gotten to be very, very good at developing the same.

…The average city the size of Topeka produces a major league player every 10 or 15 years. If we did the same things for young writers, every city would produce a Shakespeare or a Dickens or at least a Graham Greene every 10 or 15 years. Instead, we tell the young writers that they should work on their craft for 20 or 25 years, get to be really, really good - among the best in the world - and then we’ll give them a little bit of recognition.

“Story Spoilers Don’t Spoil Stories” (Psychological Science 2011_13ya)↩︎

“Why does attention to web articles fall with time?”, Simkin & Roychowdhury 2012_12ya:

We analyze access statistics for a few dozen blog entries for a period of several years. Access rate falls as an inverse power of time passed since publication. The power law holds for periods up to thousand days. The exponents are different for different blogs and are distributed between 1 and 3. Decay of attention to aging web articles has been reported before and two explanations were proposed. One explanation introduced some decaying with time novelty factor. Another used some intricate theory of human dynamics. We argue that the decay of attention to a web article is simply caused by the link to it first dropping down the list of links on the website’s front page, disappearing from the front page and subsequent movement further into background.

…The probability of following a link depends not only on its position in the list, but also on how attractive is its description. The attractiveness factor is constant and does not vary from day to day. Naturally, it influences only a prefactor and not the power law exponent. At different times, Reality Carnival linked to two webpages from reverent.org. One can see from Figure 2(a) that the prefactors differ 1.5 times, but exponents are the same within 2%. Similar pattern holds for three other blogs shown in Fig. 2.

[“Why You Like to Watch the Same Thing Over and Over and Over Again: Reruns spark contemplation about personal growth”], Scientific American:

The responses suggested that sometimes choosing to do something again was about reaching for a sure thing-the brain knows the exact kind of reward that it will receive in the end, whether it is laughter, excitement or relaxation. They also learned that people gained insight into themselves and their own growth by going back for a do-over, subconsciously using the rerun or old book as a measuring stick for how their own lives had changed. One woman, for example, rewatched the romantic Kevin Costner movie Message in a Bottle more than once: “It was helping her work through having an engagement that hadn’t worked out,” Russell says. Every time she watched that movie, it reminded her of her own failed relationship-and her reactions helped her see she was getting over it. “I was very surprised,” Russell says. “I thought that people reconsumed these things for nostalgia, to go back to the past. But they were actually very forward-looking and prospective.” What about the boredom factor, you might ask? There was none to speak of. After all, Russell says, paraphrasing Greek philosopher Heraclitus: You never cross the same river twice-it’s not the same river, and it’s not the same you.

“Mere Exposure to Bad Art: Experiment Results”, Margaret Moore↩︎

The same post summarizes the experiment Moore et al ran:

We replicated Cutting’s study exposing subjects to 12 little-known late landscapes of John Everett Millais, alongside 48 paintings by the American artist Thomas Kinkade, (again, half of each group of paintings were exposed four times as often). We asked control groups[1] and the experimental group to express the extent to which they liked each painting using a 10 point Likert scale. We found that with bad paintings by Kinkade, exposure decreased, rather than increased, liking in relation to our control groups.

…The experiment subjects had been exposed to all 60 paintings in the study at least once. In light of this, we distinguished between those paintings to which that group had been exposed once versus those to which they had been exposed multiple times. That is, we compiled results for four groups of paintings: Millais (single exposure); Millais (multiple exposure); Kinkade (single exposure); and Kinkade (multiple exposure). Comparing the ratings given by our experimental subjects to those given by the members of our philosophy control group, we observed almost uniformly lower ratings for the Kinkade paintings. 47 out of 48 Kinkades received lower mean liking scores from the experimental subjects than they received from those in the unexposed control group. This resulted in mean scores of 5.9 (control) versus 5.1 (experiment) for the single exposure Kinkade paintings, and mean scores of 5.74 (control) versus 4.75 (experiment) for the multiple exposure Kinkades.

I qualify it because the claim comes from a professor based on informal testing of his students, and the one published study I know of, by Sean Olive, did not reproduce the finding, plausible as it seems.↩︎

“Pandora’s digital box: From films to files”, David Bordwell

…This raises the fascinating question of changing perceptual frames of reference. My friend knew the film [Night of the Living Dead] very well, and he’d watched it many times on VHS. Did he somehow see the 16 screening as just a bigger tape replay? Did none of its superiority register? Maybe not. 1915^–₁₀1925_99ya, Thomas Edison demonstrated his Diamond Disc Phonograph by inviting audiences to compare live performances with recordings. His publicists came up with the celebrated Tone Tests. A singer on stage would stand by while the disc began to play. Abruptly the disc would be turned down and the singer would continue without missing a note. Then the singer would stop and the disc, now turned up, would pick up the thread of melody. Greg Milner writes of the first demonstration:

The record continued playing, with [the contralto Christine] Miller onstage dipping in and out of it like a DJ. The audience cheered every time she stopped moving her lips and let the record sing for her.

At one point the lights went out, but the music continued. The audience could not tell when Miller stopped and the playback started. The Tone Tests toured the world. According the publicity machine run by the Wizard of Menlo Park, millions of people witnessed them and no one could unerringly distinguish the performers from their recording. Edison’s sound recording was acoustic, not electrical, and so it sounds hopelessly unrealistic to us today. (You can sample some tunes here.) And there’s some evidence, as Milner points out, that singers learned to imitate the squeezed quality of the recordings. But if the audiences were fairly regularly fooled, it suggests that our sense of what sounds, or looks, right, is both untrustworthy and changeable over history.

“Human cortical activity evoked by the assignment of authenticity when viewing works of art”; Jonah Lehrer’s summary:

Many of these variables are capable of distorting our perceptions, so that we imagine differences that don’t actually exist; the verdict of art history warps what we see. The power of a Rembrandt, in other words, is inseparable from the fact that it’s a Rembrandt. The man is a potent brand. To test these competing hypotheses, a team of researchers at Oxford University, including Mengfei Huang, Holly Bridge, Martin Kemp and Andrew Parker, set up a simple experiment. They recruited 14 volunteers who were familiar with Rembrandt but had no formal training in art history. The subjects were then put into an fMRI machine and given the following instructions:

In this experiment you will see a sequence of 50 Rembrandt paintings. Before each image appears, an audio prompt will announce whether the upcoming painting is ‘authentic’ or a ‘copy’ (Please see background for further information on copies). A blank screen will appear for a few seconds after each image to allow you to relax your gaze.

…The mischievous scientists reversed the attribution of the paintings, so that half of the subjects were told that the real Rembrandts were actually copies…That said, it’s not exactly surprising that such similar paintings would elicit virtually identical sensory responses. It takes years of training before critics can reliably discern real Rembrandt from copies. And even then there is often extensive disagreement, as the 1995_29ya Metropolitan show demonstrates. However, the scientists did locate a pattern of activity that appeared whenever a painting was deemed to be authentic, regardless of whether or not it was actually “real.” In such instances, subjects showed a spike in activity in the orbitofrontal cortex, a chunk of brain just behind the eyes that is often associated with perceptions of reward, pleasure and monetary gain. (According to the scientists, this activation reflects “the increase in the perceived value of the artwork.”) Interestingly, there was no difference in orbitofrontal response when the stamp of authenticity was applied to a fake Rembrandt, as the brain area responded just as robustly. The quality of art seemed to be irrelevant. The last meaningful result from the fMRI experiment came when the subjects stared at the inauthentic portraits. It turns out that these fake Rembrandts generated the strongest activations, both in the frontopolar cortex and precuneus. The scientists explain this activation in terms of working memory, as the people were actively trying to “detect the flaws in the presented image.” Because the portraits looked like real Rembrandts - and in many instances were - the subjects were forced to search for visual blemishes to justify the negative verdict, analyzing the paintings for flaws and mistakes that Rembrandt would never make. All of this mental analysis requires frontal lobe activity; being a critic is hard work. Here is Parker, summarizing the results:

Our findings support the idea that when people make aesthetic judgements, they are subject to a variety of influences. Not all of these are immediately articulated. Indeed, some may be inaccessible to direct introspection but their presence might be revealed by brain imaging. It suggests that different regions of the brain interact together when a complex judgment is formed, rather than there being a single area of the brain that deals with aesthetic judgements.

This sort of paradox is why exponential discounting is almost universally considered a more rational discounting scheme, and indeed, places where outcomes really matter and competition is brutal, like finance, use exponential discounting. But it doesn’t come easy; it can take financial penalties and rewards to force people to adopt more exponential schemes.↩︎

“A Neural Predictor of Cultural Popularity”, abstract:

How can we predict popularity? Although superficially a trivial question, the desire for popularity consumes a great portion of the lives of many youths and adults. Being popular is a marker for social status, and consequently, would seem to confer a reproductive advantage in the evolution of the human species, thus explaining the importance of popularity to humans. Such importance extends to economic success as well because goods and services that are popular command higher prices. Here, we are interested in predicting cultural popularity - something that is popular in the broadest sense and appeals to a large number of individuals. Neuroeconomic research suggests that activity in reward-related regions of the brain, notably the orbitofrontal cortex and ventral striatum 1-4, is predictive of future purchasing decisions, but it is unknown whether the neural signals of a small group of individuals are predictive of the purchasing decisions of the population at large. For neuroimaging to be useful as a measure of widespread popularity, these neural responses would have to generalize to a much larger population that is not the direct subject of the brain imaging itself. Moreover, to be useful as a predictor, such a test would need to be done prospectively. Here, we test the possibility of using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to predict the relative popularity of a common good: music. We used fMRI to measure the brain responses of a focus group of adolescents while listening to songs of relatively unknown artists 5. As a measure of popularity, the sales of these songs were totaled for the three years follow ing scanning, and brain responses were then correlated with these “future” earnings. Although subjective likability of the songs was not predictive of sales, activity within the ventral striatum was [statistically-]significantly correlated with the number of units sold. These results suggest that the neural responses to goods are not only predictive of purchase decisions for those individuals actually scanned, but such responses generalize to the population at large and may be used to predict cultural popularity.

De Divinatione, bk. 2, sct. 58↩︎

Given that this is all common knowledge, any advantage to musical instruments in college admissions would constitute a kind of inefficiency (see also Goodhart’s law); hence it does not surprise me to read observations to that effect (even if they are only pseudonymous online anecdotes):

When I was an admissions office for a short time, my advice to Asian applicants looking to be noticed was to go to clown school, perform as a semi-professional magician, or even excel at sports. Violin, cello, piano, essays about translating for your immigrant parents, computers, math, science…all that stuff blends together after awhile and makes it hard for an admissions office to remember you when sitting around the table voting on applicants…This is pretty close to how we did things at Princeton. You can only admit so many violin playing science hopefuls. –brandnewlow

Full disclaimer: I’m a sophomore at Yale, my adviser last year was an admissions officer, and a friend of mine works in the admissions…There is no EXPLICIT comparison of Asians to Asians. Nobody looks at your application and says “Oh, another Asian, let me turn on my Asian scale!” What happens, subconsciously, is that the stereotypical Asian profile is “high scoring, high GPA, piano/violin, tennis, math/science.” So a lot of qualified Asians get rejected because their admission officer can’t find enough good arguments for them. Regardless of how qualified you are individually, Yale is trying to build a diverse class, so if you do the same thing as 1000_1,024ya other candidates, it’s very hard to vouch for you. “What do you bring to the campus that this other kid doesn’t?” , and that’s the end of it. –BlackJack

Mental disorders like post-traumatic stress disorder and suicide, perhaps the ultimate indicator of unhappiness, are increasingly common in former American soldiers thanks to the perpetual War on Terror:

• From 1999^–₅2004_20ya, 70,000 new veterans received the highest level PTSD benefits, for 216,000 diagnosed PTSD cases in total; “17% of troops returning from duty in Iraq met the strict screening criteria for mental problems such as PTSD” (which is still better than 30% in Vietnam, but worse than 10% in WWII)

• A 2007 study found a 12% PTSD rate for the Iraq & Afghanistan theaters (>1.8m Americans deployed)

• 162 active-duty soldiers committed suicide in 2009_15ya (with 101 drug deaths 2006^–₃2009_15ya, some of which may be suicides); estimates of PTSD now start at 300,000

• 2009 and 2010_14ya active-duty suicides exceeded combat deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan

• the VA deals with 950 suicide attempts as of April 2010_14ya, See also the RAND study “The War Within: Preventing Suicide in the U.S. Military” which covers the 50% rise in suicide rates 2001^–₇2008_16ya, and tactics like Battle buddy.

With all that in mind, it is interesting to consider the positives and negatives of being a military brat.↩︎

Steve Sailer retells one of many jokes expressing this observation:

“I can’t get a date, Doc,” the new patient griped to his psychiatrist. “See, I sweep up the circus elephants’ droppings and can never wash the stench off me.”

“Perhaps you should get a different job.”

“What, and quit show business?”

“Virtuosos Becoming a Dime a Dozen”, Anthony Tommasini, New York Times; besides inadvertently making the point that we truly do not need more pianists, Tommasini also adds some fodder to the notion that this is not just an East Asian or Asian-American arms race but includes Europe and Russia as well:

Ms. Wang’s virtuosity is stunning. But is that so unusual these days? Not really. That a young pianist has come along who can seemingly play anything, and easily, is not the big deal it would have been a short time ago. The overall level of technical proficiency in instrumental playing, especially on the piano, has increased steadily over time. Many piano teachers, critics and commentators have noted the phenomenon, which is not unlike what happens in sports…Something similar has long been occurring with pianists. And in the last decade or so the growth of technical proficiency has seemed exponential. Yes, Ms. Wang, who will make her New York recital debut at Carnegie Hall in October, can play anything. But in China alone, in recent years, there have been Lang Lang and Yundi Li. Russia has given us Kirill Gerstein, born in 1979_45ya, the latest recipient of the distinguished Gilmore Artist Award

…Because so many pianists are so good, many concertgoers have simply come to expect that any soloist playing the Tchaikovsky First Concerto with the New York Philharmonic will be a phenomenal technician. A new level of technical excellence is expected of emerging pianists. I see it not just on the concert circuit but also at conservatories and colleges. In recent years, at recitals and chamber music programs at the Juilliard School and elsewhere, particularly with contemporary-music ensembles, I have repeatedly been struck by the sheer level of instrumental expertise that seems a given. …The first several decades of the 20^th century are considered a golden era by many piano buffs, a time when artistic imagination and musical richness were valued more than technical perfection. There were certainly pianists during that period who had exquisite, impressive technique, like Josef Lhevinne and Rachmaninoff himself. And white-hot virtuosos like the young Vladimir Horowitz wowed the public. But audiences and critics tolerated a lot of playing that would be considered sloppy today. Listen to 1920s and ’30s recordings of the pianist Alfred Cortot, immensely respected in his day. He would probably not be admitted to Juilliard now. Despite the refinement and élan in his playing, his recording of Chopin’s 24 études from the early 1930s is, by today’s standards, littered with clinkers.

…I would place essential artists today like Richard Goode, Mitsuko Uchida and Andras Schiff among the group with all the technique they need. Among younger pianists, this club would include Jonathan Biss, a sensitive, musically scrupulous player; and one of my new favorites, the young Israeli David Greilsammer, who played an inspiring program at the Walter Reade Theater last year in which he made connections among composers from Monteverdi to John Adams, with stops at Rameau, Janacek, Ligeti and more. He may not be a supervirtuoso. But I find his elegant artistry and pianism more gratifying than the hyperexpressive virtuosity of Lang Lang, whose astonishing technique I certainly salute. Besides, the group of play-anything pianists, of which Mr. Lang is a leader, is getting pretty big. Among them you would have to include Garrick Ohlsson, who not only plays with resourceful mastery but seems to play everything, including all the works of Chopin. I would include Leif Ove Andsnes, an artist I revere, who does not call attention to himself but plays with exquisite technique and vibrant musicality. This list goes on. Martha Argerich can be a wild woman at the piano, but who cares? She has stupefying technique and arresting musical ideas. I would add Krystian Zimerman, Marc-André Hamelin and probably Jean-Yves Thibaudet to this roster. There are others, both older and younger pianists….After Mr. Kissin’s Liszt Sonata a piano enthusiast sitting near me asked, “Have you ever heard the piece played so magnificently?” I said that the performance was indeed amazing, but that actually, yes, I had heard a comparably magnificent performance on the same stage a few months earlier during a recital by Stephen Hough. Mr. Hough’s playing was just as prodigious technically, and I found his conception more engrossing. He reconciled the episodic sections of this teeming work into an awesome entity. Mr. Hough is another pianist who can play anything. Join the club.

A Higurashi ‘doujin opera’ (homepage) was performed, to apparently good reviews, although I can’t evaluate the recorded scene online myself, not being an opera person.↩︎

This is a general assertion that is fairly hard to prove, but an example may be suggestive. The Touhou doujinshi-game phenomenon has a fair amount of music, but to get a sense of the true scale, we can look at some numbers. From the talk “Riding on Fans’ Energy: Touhou, Fan Culture, and Grassroot Entertainment” (Barcamp Bangkok 2 on August 31, 2008_16ya):

Touhou is ZUN’s work as much as it is a gigantic repertoire of fan-made manga, games, music, and video clips. I estimate that there are roughly at least three thousands short manga, five hundred music rearrangement albums, and one hundred derivative games created since 2003_21ya. These works are traded mainly in conventions dedicated to them, and some commercial firms are starting to capitalize on their popularity. Doujinshi shops like Tora no Ana and Mandarake have shelves dedicate to Touhou comics. And Amazon.co.jp are carrying CDs of arranged/sampled Touhou music (but not ZUN’s originals). More and more people are attracted to the franchise because its diverse derivative works provide a variety of entry points for potential fans. In fact, Touhou’s popularity skyrocketed when it became one of the killer content of Nico Nico Douga, a Japanese equivalent of YouTube launched one year and a half earlier. There, Touhou content spread like wild fire and gave rise to many recurring memes and tens of thousands of mashup videos. To give a sense of how popular Touhou is in Nico Nico Douga, 18 of 100 most viewed videos are Touhou-related, and the best Touhou video ranks the 6th. [5]

For a recent estimate, we can turn to TV Tropes’s article on Touhou music:

The Touhou Project really gets a lot of great pieces of music for [the music] being [originally] made up by a single guy with a synthesizer. To put the sheer number of remix CDs in perspective, there is a torrent with over 870.4 gigabytes of over 3000 Touhou remixes, and that only includes the ones that the (English-speaking) maintainers of the torrent have added.

(This is outdated; the October 2011_13ya lossless torrent is 1,020 gigabytes. Personally, I enjoy the orchestral pieces like the WAVE group’s Luna Forest (第七楽章).)↩︎

On the dollar figures, see Mangione (1972_52ya, p. 369). Mangione, Jerre. 1972_52ya. The Dream and the Deal: The Federal Writer’s Project, 1935^–₈1943_81ya. Boston: Little, Brown and Company On the seen and the unseen, see Bastiat (1850_174ya). Bastiat, Frédéric. 1850_174ya. Essays on Political Economy. London: A. W. Bennett↩︎

See Johnson (1997_27ya, p. 9); the data refer to 1995_29ya. Johnson, Arthur T. 1997_27ya. Symphony Orchestras and Local Governments. Working paper, Maryland Institute for Policy Analysis and Research, University of Maryland Baltimore County. On foundations, see Dowie (2001_23ya, p. 169). Dowie, Mark. 2001_23ya. American Foundations: An Investigative History. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press↩︎

See Giving USA (2003_21ya, pp. 195-97). On the French comparison, see Archambault (1997_27ya, p. 208). Archambault, Edith. 1997_27ya. The Nonprofit Sector in France [and “Historical Roots of the Nonprofit Sector in France”, Archambault 2001_23ya]. Manchester, England: Manchester University Press.↩︎

See Clotfelter (1985_39ya, chap. 2, and p. 274). Clotfelter, Charles T. 1985_39ya. Federal Tax Policy and Charitable Giving. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.↩︎

Some provisions of the tax law have hurt artists. This includes the taxation of fellowship awards and unemployment compensation (both instituted in 1986_38ya), disallowance of income averaging (which had helped artists with volatile incomes), and the 1986_38ya restrictions on in-kind deductions for artworks given to museums. But for the most part the American tax system subsidizes the arts.↩︎

See Frey and Pommerehne (1989_35ya, p. 43) Frey, Bruno S., and Werner W. Pommerehne. 1989_35ya. Muses and Markets: Explorations in the Economics of the Arts. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Basil Blackwell. and on England, see Clotfelter (1985_39ya, pp. 96-97). Schuster (1989_35ya, p. 33) catalogs some of the tax privileges that European governments have granted to the arts since the Second World War. Schuster, J. Mark Davidson. 1989_35ya. The Search for International Models: Results from Recent Comparative Research in Arts Policy. In Who’s to Pay for the Arts? The International Search for Models of Arts Support, edited by Milton C. Cummings Junior, and J. Mark Davidson Schuster. New York: ACA Books, pp. 15-42↩︎

If we use the average tax rate, the potency of corporate tax incentives appears to be quite high, less so for the marginal rate. The marginal rate is the technically correct magnitude, but difficulties in measuring the true marginal rate suggest that the average rate is sometimes the better proxy. See Clotfelter (1985_39ya, chap. 5) on these issues.↩︎

Conlogue, Ray. 2000_24ya. “From the St. Lawrence Centre to Steel City”. Toronto Globe and Mail, June 21, p. R5.↩︎

That is from the National Center for Education Statistics; see “Public Libraries in the United States: Fiscal Year 2002_22ya (E.D. TAB)”↩︎

See Goldstein (2000_24ya, pp. 59, 89, 109). Goldstein, Malcolm. 2000_24ya. Landscape with Figures: A History of Art Dealing in the United States. Oxford: Oxford University Press.↩︎

Hamilton 2000_24ya (pg31). Casanova Was a Book Lover, and Other Naked Truths and Provocative Curiosities about the Writing, Selling, and Reading of Books. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press↩︎

Arenson, Karen W. 2002_22ya. Arts Groups and Artists Find Angels: Universities, The New York Times, October 30, pp. B1, B8↩︎

Russell, John J., and Thomas S. Spencer. 2000_24ya. Art on Campus: The College Art Association’s Official Guide to American College and University Art Museums and Exhibition Galleries. Monkton, Maryland: Friar’s Lantern↩︎

See Arthur Cohen (1998_26ya, pp. 292, 393), The 14% figure is from Arthur Cohen (1998_26ya, p. 394). Cohen, Arthur M. 1998_26ya. The Shaping of American Higher Education. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass Publishers Trow (1993_31ya, p. 40) Trow, Martin. 1993_31ya. “Federalism in American Higher Education”. In Higher Learning in America, 1980^–₂₀2000_24ya, edited by Arthur Levine. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, pp. 39-65 Page and Simmons (2000_24ya, pp. 194-95). Page, Benjamin I., and James R. Simmons. 2000_24ya. What Government Can Do: Dealing with Poverty and Inequality. Chicago: University of Chicago Press↩︎

Cohen and Noll (1998_26ya, pp. 36-37). Cohen, Linda R., and Roger G. Noll. 1998_26ya. Universities, Constituencies, and the Role of the States. In Challenges to Research Universities, edited by Roger G. Noll. Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, pp. 31-62 ↩︎

Page and Simmons (2000_24ya, p. 195).↩︎

Trow (1993_31ya, pp. 57-58).↩︎

On Smithsonian fund-raising, see Trescott 2000_24ya. On the federal appropriation, see Puente 2003_21ya and also the Smithsonian Web site.↩︎

On the history of the army collection, see Sullivan (1991_33ya); on works held and also on the navy collection, see Evans (1946_78ya, app. 2). The most famous war pictures of an American artist are those by John Singer Sargent (Gassed is the best known), although these were commissioned by the British authorities, not the American government. On Sargent’s war work, see Little (1998_26ya)↩︎

On the USO, see Fawkes (1978_46ya, chap. 9, and p. 122) and the USO Web site.↩︎

Wyszomirski 1999_25ya (pg177). On Sousa, see Overmyer 1939_85ya (pg155) and Crawford 2001_23ya (pg457–58). On bands, see Trescott 1995_29ya.↩︎

United States Urban Arts Federation Fiscal Year 2002_22ya (2002_22ya, p. 3). See also Cowen (2005_19ya, pp. 6-7).↩︎

Midgette (2000_24ya).↩︎

Cowen (2002_22ya, chap. 4)↩︎

See Bustard (1997_27ya, pp. 12-14) on the programs in general and Daniel (1987_37ya) on the USDA program, with the quotation from Daniel, p. 41↩︎

See Wagnleitner (1994_30ya, p. 72) and Pommerin (1996_28ya, p. 9). On censorship in Japan, see Dower (1999_25ya, chap. 14)↩︎

The numbers are taken from Wagnleitner (1994_30ya, p. 57) and drawn from U.S. budget data↩︎

Snyder (1995_29ya, p. xi)↩︎

For a summary of the Smith-Mundt Act, and other relevant legislation, see Henderson (1969_55ya, pp. 302-7). On the genesis of the very complicated network of overlapping agencies, see Henderson (1969_55ya). On the roots in the 1930s, see Thompson and Laves (1963_61ya, pp. 36-37) and Shuster (1968_56ya)↩︎

Snyder (1995_29ya, p. xi)↩︎

Wagnleitner (1994, pp. 61, 149). On the 1969 estimate, see Henderson (1969, p. 75). Ironically many of the funds for these cultural outreach programs were taken from the Counterpart Funds from the Marshall Plan, and thus paid for by European taxpayers, not American taxpayers. (European governments had to put up money for each dollar received through Marshall Plan aid.) In essence, the Europeans were bribed to spend money on American cultural producers, so that they might be swayed to the American way of life. See Wagnleitner (1994, p. 57). On USIA more generally, see Elder (1968). In 1985 the USIA budget was $796 million, many times larger than the NEA allocation. On the post-Reagan decline in these programs, see Kinzer (2001)↩︎

On the USIA estimate, see Coombs (1964_60ya, pp. 59-60). On audience size, see Browne (1982_42ya, p. 116). See also Wagnleitner (1994_30ya, pp. 61, 210-11) and Hixson (1997_27ya, pp. 115-17)↩︎

See Wagnleitner (1994_30ya, pp. 61, 210-11) and Hixson (1997_27ya, pp. 115-17). Heil (2003_21ya) is a good source on VOA. I am indebted to Bryan Caplan for the phrase artistic famine relief. Richmond (2003_21ya) surveys cultural exchange programs, with an emphasis on their impact on the Soviet Union↩︎

See von Eschen (2000_24ya and 2004_20ya) on jazz and the State Department, and Saunders (1999_25ya, pp. 20, 291) and Hixson (1997_27ya, p. 137) on African-American issues↩︎

See, for instance, Richmond (2003_21ya, p. 124) on these exchanges.↩︎

See Fine & Whiteman 2002_22ya on Sawa’s origins; on criticisms, see Kessler (2004_20ya)↩︎

MacFarquhar (2004_20ya)↩︎

On the importance of federal support for these arts, see Lowry & Hooker 1968_56ya and von Eschen (2000_24ya, passim, p. 167). On Ailey, see Dunning (1996_28ya, pp. 145-255). On Gillespie, see Maggin (2005_19ya, chaps. 27, 28) and von Eschen (2004_20ya, p. 35)↩︎

On the penetration of foundations, see Saunders (1999_25ya, pp. 134-35); on books, see p. 245↩︎

Wagnleitner (1994_30ya, pp. 137-38). On USIA, see Wetenhall (1992_32ya, p. 145).↩︎

On Proust, see the Guardian, “Finding the time”.↩︎

See Learning to e-read, The Economist (2000_24ya).↩︎

On this episode, see Crawford (2001_23ya, pp. 720-21).↩︎