“It is a good sign in a nation when things are done badly. It shows that all the people are doing them. And it is bad sign in a nation when such things are done very well, for it shows that only a few experts and eccentrics are doing them, and that the nation is merely looking on.” -GK Chestertong<p>edit: typo left in for reflexive humor
Here is part two if anyone wants to continue reading: <a href="https://paulskallas.substack.com/p/refinement-culture-c1b" rel="nofollow">https://paulskallas.substack.com/p/refinement-culture-c1b</a>.
A nit on the basketball portion of the article:<p>> Now the game has shifted to 3-point shooters and players who drive to the basket for close shots. How did this happen? Almost every team now has an NBA analytics department in the front office.<p>This is minimizing the effect of the rules changes in the NBA that have occurred over the past 20 years to restrict defensive players and protect shooters. The basketball of the 2020's is a different game from the basketball of 90's.<p>For consideration:<p>Rules Changes: <a href="https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:bRnr3xxAzwMJ:https://cdn.nba.net/nba-drupal-prod/nba-rules-changes-history.pdf+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us&client=firefox-b-1-d" rel="nofollow">https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:bRnr3x...</a><p>Analysis: <a href="https://sidelinesources.com/the-defensive-rule-change-that-sparked-the-modern-game/" rel="nofollow">https://sidelinesources.com/the-defensive-rule-change-that-s...</a>
In professional sports the more crucial metric is the number of butts in the bleachers and watching on the tube. Winning more games sure helps with that. But in baseball there's a tension between winning more games and playing more exciting games with more action. With those things going in the opposite direction, the whole business model is threatened. Politics have been blamed for the ratings drop, but a lot could be just that games have gotten progressively more boring.<p>I wonder what rule change in baseball could fix this, along the lines of the basketball shot clock. From a business perspective, the leagues as a whole should be refining that instead.<p>Up to a point, anyway, given that gladiatorial combat to the death would probably be a huge draw. "Next on ESPN, The Hunger Games XXIII. Stay tuned!" Maybe we're already evolving in that direction with the popularity of competitions like "Alone" and the battle royales on Twitch.
Great essay. I’ve been thinking of this as a rise in “professionalizing” everything (I have neighbors who hire people to string up Christmas lights and decorate their tree) but this essay gets to the heart of it.<p>It’s a movement to a monoculture which, in every context, increases risk of failure. Plus it’s boring.<p>Edit: part two of the essay expresses this risk well: “… systems cannot really optimize; optimization leads to nonlinear increase in hidden risks which invariably blows up the apparatus.”
Sure, things become boring as they become popular, and therefore optimised.<p>Rather than lamenting the loss of baseball, you can go and find another sport that is more immature, scrappier, and so on. If pop music is predictable then find a music genre that is less well known.<p>The key is to look to where the money is, and then go elsewhere.
I didn't see a definition, but this seems to be a concise instance of the effect:<p>> These minimal improvements in each phone are indistinguishable to the average person. It's still 2007 we are stuck. All they can do is add another camera to the back. Refining.<p>It's kind of interesting that all of the examples lie in mass culture. Sports. Phones. Marketing. Cars.<p>Writing is covered in Part 2:<p>> It managed to get the top of Hacker News without anyone realizing it wasn’t a real person writing it [GPT-3 did].<p><a href="https://paulskallas.substack.com/p/refinement-culture-c1b" rel="nofollow">https://paulskallas.substack.com/p/refinement-culture-c1b</a><p>Even so, writing that appears on the front page of HN is not likely to be too far out of the bounds of normal. That's the whole idea.<p>What all of these phenomena have in common is mass market selection pressure. You have a thing that needs to appeal to the largest possible audience.<p>Is it any surprise that the things that pop out the other end of this Darwinian selector tend to look the same? To be a little too optimized? To lack personality or quirkiness?<p>If you want to see counterexamples, look at any niche community. They're all over the Internet. Some of them surfaced during the last US presidential election, to the shock and horror of the masses. These communities seem to be growing in number, and exploring ever more exotic norms of behavior, aesthetics, spirituality, and ground truth.
The "ideal male body" in the last article in the series (in a picture from a tweet) is Fedor Emelianenko, a legendary heavyweight MMA fighter (and that's really understating it).<p>Of course Fedor is no body-builder, but 80% of males on the planet would probably find it very hard to reach Fedor's physique, even if they trained as hard as he must have.<p>Anyway Fedor became legendary for his skill and his technique, not his physique. In the olden days of MMA, when men fought like men, in the ring, rather than like animals in a cage, Fedor made his name by bringing down enemies bigger and stronger than himself in a sport were you don't win on points; and also of course for exhibiting something that approached chivalry and honour, as much as such can be found in any sport where two grown men turn each other's face to mush for a crowd's entertainment.<p>I digress. Fedor's is not the ideal male body. The ideal male brain, maybe - for a time of war, certainly. But he's a professional fighter and most males aren't. Holding his body up as the ideal male physique is committing the same sin of unnatural over-otpimisation the rest of the article (very clumsily, I find) supports.
I am a professional cartoonist and it is my professional opinion that the older picture of Chuck E Cheese at the end of the article is a steaming pile of nasty airbrushed mess. Not appealing. Over-rendered.
My take on this is that somehow this seems to be human nature at play (and should be accounted for) . This applies for anything that has some set of rules defined (be it by people, or nature). Basically a game. Everyone is trying to maximize for the win. Now and then a new thing is discovered and along with it, some new use cases for maximizing the wins. It's the same for politics (obscure laws that open different use cases), music (millennial whoop) , film (netflix only running series with 2-3 seasons) , formula 1, etc.
What are the alternatives? Which future do we want among those alternatives?<p>Alt0: Stop optimizing. Unlikely. The incentives will pull agents to optimize.<p>Alt1: Change the rules of the games. Unlikely to a lesser degree. They did this to hockey relatively recently.<p>Alt2: Go local. Like the rise of kabbadi in India, going for local sport or local groceries will allow for greater diversity. Somewhat happening.<p>Alt3: ?
> Women all wear the same makeup now.<p>I doubt it. I haven't seen a lot of women done up for work since last March, but this is not my recollection.<p>> They all look kind of like Kim Kardashian.<p>Where does this gentleman live?<p>> Everyone is taking vitamins now.<p>Perhaps in the neighborhoods where the women all look kind of like Kim Kardashian.
Somewhat related, but about academic economics: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27273346" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27273346</a>
This is a huge problem in video games now IMO. Any card game everyone plays the same decks, in MOBAs everyone builds the same and prioritizes the same picks, in MMOs everyone wants only the BiS gear and specs the same way, etc. Basically so many games are "solved" and there are so many people who min-max the games become totally unfun.<p>Funny the author brings up the Olympics because I always complain that the most aesthetically pleasing figure skating runs never win because they aren't crammed wall to wall with "technical requirements". Also re: baseball, I wonder how many more ads there are today?
This article reminded me of an excerpt from "Diary of a Bad Year," where J.M. Coetzee complains that the insistence on accuracy and objectivity in sports officiating represents an anti-social, inhuman attitude toward sport (think about why many people find the prospect of robot umpires in baseball distasteful). Coetzee suggests that this trend began in horse racing because bettors had money riding on the outcome, and that demanded accuracy.<p>It's tempting to think that the "refinement culture" that Skallas is talking about, which encompasses everything from hyper-optimized athletic training, to corporate mascots rebranded for sex appeal, is similarly motivated by what is, at base, just capitalism.
"It has to do with refinement of things, games, products and aesthetics. It’s hard to describe exactly WHAT Refinement Culture really means."<p>The author fails to provide any shape to this. He doesn't describe what refinement culture is. It's a list disconnected changes. I don't know what he's trying to say other than "I don't like how some things change". An AI may have written a better article (if this wasn't already AI generated).