Quantitative Aesthetics

July 7, 2023 6:26 PM

Where data points dictate taste: the humanities crash and the McNamara Fallacy in culture.
posted by blue shadows (40 comments total)

Reducing everything to a number starts with reducing everything.

My opinion may be suspect because I was an English major, but quantifying everything requires discarding most of the nuance.
posted by wenestvedt at 6:45 PM on July 7, 2023 [23 favorites]

while I dont necessarily disagree with this article, I think this phenomenon seems limited to folks stuck deep into social media - which I think are kind of feeble-minded?

And yeah in general if people are just assuming that what’s quantitative is what’s important I think they kind of have themselves to blame? Unexamined life and all that - plus the qualitatively important aesthetic things are in some sense self-evident / reveal themselves to those who have the discipline and emotional intelligence to perceive.

Like if you really think about it we are in the golden age of access to so so so much great stuff instantly.

I guess my point is is that there’s a lot of stuff out there these days and people stuck in their like-holes should like just open their mind man…
posted by web5.0 at 7:13 PM on July 7, 2023 [2 favorites]

I feel like this sort of essay could have been written any time in the last... 50 years? Longer? I don't disagree that this is a problem, but the essay doesn't really address any sort of cause or pressures that are accelerating the process, or take time to seek out counterexamples/pockets of resistance.

Fine as far as pointing to a few examples of the problem goes, but we already know the old saws about the cost of everything/value of nothing - I'd be curious to read about why we seem to keep falling into the same trap.
posted by sagc at 7:16 PM on July 7, 2023 [5 favorites]

I feel like this sort of essay could have been written any time in the last... 50 years? Longer?

Fully forty years ago, a fellow psych major in college informed me that they were going hard Skinnerian, and that behavioral psych was the only really scientific way to go because only things that were directly observable mattered.
posted by Halloween Jack at 7:20 PM on July 7, 2023 [5 favorites]

and that behavioral psych was the only really scientific way to go because only things that were directly observable mattered.

Your guy probably has an MBA now. A lot of people manage to lose track of the fact that money has never been anything but a proxy metric at the exact moment they start getting paid.
posted by mhoye at 7:30 PM on July 7, 2023 [7 favorites]

I noped out after reading the intro about Bankman-Fried "proving" the over-ratedness of Shakespeare. I mean, fraudulent sociopathic poseur says what?

I figure a piece that leads with something like that can only head downhill.
posted by Aardvark Cheeselog at 7:43 PM on July 7, 2023 [5 favorites]

while I dont necessarily disagree with this article, I think this phenomenon seems limited to folks stuck deep into social media - which I think are kind of feeble-minded?

The fallacy at the core of the article's argument is at least related to the kind of blindness and bias by which supposedly objective models turn out to be racist in operation. Including the the way McNamara and the 'whiz kids' ran the Vietnam war.

It's an interesting way to think about these things, even if it doesn't do much more than sketch out the problem.
posted by snuffleupagus at 7:43 PM on July 7, 2023 [1 favorite]

Aardvark Cheeselog, I feel like you entirely misread the piece? It's decrying that moment, and moments like it.
posted by sagc at 7:48 PM on July 7, 2023 [12 favorites]

I noped out after reading the intro about Bankman-Fried "proving" the over-ratedness of Shakespeare.

Who do you want to ridicule, here - Bankman-Fried, or everyone who invested in him?

I mean, the thing you should really take from this is that high marginal tax rates are not just a national security issue, they're an epistemological integrity question as well. If money is a proxy for value, the people who talk about value solely in terms of money - who see art as "content", for example - rather than the more nebulous and hard-to-quantify "value" it represents, should as a matter of policy endure some potentially-existential pressure on that proxy metric in order to provide some guarantee that the value it ostensibly proxies is real and preserved.

Put differently, the people who think wealth equals worth are - demonstrably, provably - so dumb, and so gullible, that they can't be permitted to amass any real wealth if the society they live in is going to stay healthy and sane.
posted by mhoye at 8:01 PM on July 7, 2023 [20 favorites]

Yes, but how much did Millennials ruin everything with numbers? Like, 26% ruined or more like 47% ruined?

(I think the guy has a point, but he really does have this "old man yells at cloud" vibe going.)
posted by zompist at 8:21 PM on July 7, 2023

I noped out after reading the intro about Bankman-Fried "proving" the over-ratedness of Shakespeare. I mean, fraudulent sociopathic poseur says what?

FWIW, the main point of the article is to dismantle that point of view.

[Click for Spoilers]

The piece ends thus:

And so, a micro-generation gets its pockets picked by grifters using digital art to fish for suckers—and finding them at exactly the intersection where the tech takeover of public life meets the increasingly frantic economic scramble, the two factors behind the humanities erosion in the first place.

Daniel Yankelovich, the sociologist who coined the term “McNamara Fallacy,” actually outlined it as a process, one that could be broken out into four steps of escalating intellectual danger. Here they are, as it is commonly broken down, with his commentary on each:

1) Measure whatever can be easily measured. (This is OK as far as it goes.)

2) Disregard that which can’t be easily measured or to give it an arbitrary quantitative value. (This is artificial and misleading.)

3) Presume that what can’t be measured easily really isn’t important. (This is blindness.)

4) Say that what can’t be easily measured really doesn’t exist. (This is suicide.)

Based on the data I have, I’d say that we as a culture are approaching somewhere between the third and fourth steps.

I found it to be a thoughtful refutation of the idea that "that which can be measured" is the only way to evaluate the relative success of art.
posted by Joey Michaels at 8:23 PM on July 7, 2023 [8 favorites]

I won’t read the article until the post gets 10 favorites.
posted by vorpal bunny at 9:15 PM on July 7, 2023 [27 favorites]

My opinion may be suspect because I was an English major, but quantifying everything requires discarding most of the nuance.

I will follow your advice, and in the future I will discard no more than 40% of the nuance.
posted by fantabulous timewaster at 10:05 PM on July 7, 2023 [7 favorites]

I won’t read the article until the post gets 10 favorites.

I just favorited the post, bringing it from 9 to 10 favorites, solely so that you would read the article. Which means that your assessment of this article on the McNamara Fallacy has fallen prey to Campell's Law.
posted by ropeladder at 2:56 AM on July 8, 2023 [6 favorites]

I think the point isn't just that Bankman-Fried said a stupid thing, but that people didn't take it as an indication that S-B was stupid himself or bullshitting.
posted by Nancy Lebovitz at 3:41 AM on July 8, 2023 [3 favorites]

feel like this sort of essay could have been written any time in the last... 50 years? Longer?

Given that the author cites Adorno's Aesthetic Theory, first published (posthumously) in 1970, that's one of the points made here. The argument that there has been a slow decline in the perceived value of the humanities during the era of late capitalism is relevant to a point, but the key thing here is that the neoliberal takeover of tertiary education has accelerated through the cultural domination of technology as envisaged by Silicon Valley. In some sense, the quantified self of the early iPhone to Apple Watch era has been supplanted by the quantified culture described by Silicon Valley fraudsters, union-busters and white-collar criminals.

Administrators, bureaucrats, and politicians love seeing numbers. Numbers are easily understood, if we see big ones where we're hoping to see big ones, and small ones where we'd like to see small ones. Humanities graduates aren't as easily graphed into employment categories - it's easy to say "we graduated 100 hospital-ready doctors last year" but "8 graduates are working in communications, 12 are in customer service roles, 25 are undertaking further study, 3 are writing their first novel, 5 are having a good think about their next career move, and 47 are working outside their direct field of study but using their skills in unexpected ways".

We keep getting told -at least in Australian universities - that we need Job Ready Graduates. Only no-one knows what Job Ready actually looks like. We're told that they have to be trained for specific employment areas, and that they're probably in STEM. Or Cyber. But when graduates come through without analysis or critical thinking or communication or leadership skills, departments get cut for training them wrong.

In essence, universities do need to give students employable skills. But the skills students need to get are the ones that will be useful in the workplace 5 years from now. I started university teaching in 2018. The first graduates I had taught for the 3 years of my program entered the workforce at the beginning of 2021. How the hell could I prepare them for the employment market of year 2 of the pandemic?

I agree that universities need to engage with the world, with industry partners, and the public in order to be relevant and find new avenues for innovation and research. But part of that is valuing everything that universities can do.
posted by prismatic7 at 3:45 AM on July 8, 2023 [9 favorites]

My opinion may be suspect because I was an English major, but quantifying everything requires discarding most of the nuance.

Ehhhh, I call baby/bathwater. In a sense, any analysis shorter than a thousand pages discards nuance. "The map is not the territory" includes qualitative descriptions. Any summary or abstraction, any application of a lens, is saying "let's look at these aspects of it and not those". The article acknowledges this repeatedly:

"[S]tatistics is now everywhere, our language for exchanging knowledge.” Which, in some ways, is for the good. There are real benefits to asking, “who’s your sample?”
...
Again: Data analysis, done with care, can yield insights of great depth.

The problem is that for some reason, in some current cultural contexts, quantification is so often trusted as a hall pass to halt further thought or discussion. This seems true for "rationality" zealots and laypeople alike. In a way it should be understandable. Human instinct for categorization and social games like status hierarchies and gossip make "who's first?" and "who's most?" literally primal urges.

A more rational argument is that in some contexts quantification allows view of otherwise-unseen nuance. Statistical analysis and data visualization can be used to surface nuance, to explain or enrich it, and importantly to apply empiricism and rigor. Tools like these are some of the great prizes of the scientific revolution, and those who wield such powers responsibly (rightly) wear a badge of honor. What the article (rightly) decries is a kind of "stolen valor" abuse of quantitative or statistical comparisons, in addition to our overcredulity of quantitative claims to importance or truth. For whatever reasons humans find it difficult not to create, believe, and share infotainment nuggets extruded from statistical pink goo, or infographics with only void inside.

I wonder if it might help to contextualize this phenomenon as a fumbling attempt to engage with the shoggoth of our edifice of Science? Which would make this article something of a Kafkan critique of not bureaucracy but math or scientific inquiry, pointing out the tragedies naturally arising from any human system: our inability to cope with access to many and vast truths, our failure to apply them to reason through organization and contextualization.
posted by daveliepmann at 3:59 AM on July 8, 2023 [3 favorites]

Administrators, bureaucrats, and politicians love seeing numbers. Numbers are easily understood, if we see big ones where we're hoping to see big ones, and small ones where we'd like to see small ones.

If I might be allowed to apply my shoggoth lens here (thus discarding some nuance through qualitative analysis in trade for the chance at gaining nuance elsewhere), the issue often isn't that numbers are easily understood, it's that numbers are too hard to understand. Phrased less contrarily: a handful of simple numbers are easily understood, but the important numbers aren't simple and aren't just a few. The truth is composed of many many numbers, and most of them require training to have intuition for. This is true in our modern age more than it ever has been before, with the complexity of our efforts. To ask how something of modern scale is doing can be a genuine engineering problem — and understanding the answer also a technical challenge often failed.
posted by daveliepmann at 4:12 AM on July 8, 2023 [8 favorites]

“A cynic is a man who knows the price of everything, and the value of nothing.”

Off to work, will read the article later. Could be interesting,
posted by BWA at 5:11 AM on July 8, 2023 [4 favorites]

How are the humanities doing in socialist Europe? In hellscape capitalist America, it's hard to justify the time and money spent to study nuance and bullshit like literature and art. As an English major myself, the skills you learn are crucial, I think, but only indirectly useful and hard to monetize. Literature is amazing, filled with insight but also jiggery-pokery and fashion of the time that will fade or age poorly. There was a great post about DFW the other day that is emblematic. Was Infinite Jest worth reading when it came out? Is it still now? The answer can only ever be "yes and no," as the answers in the humanities always are. Part of it enriches our thinking and part of it is just wheels going round, and perhaps they are inseparable.

I really sympathize with younger generations being skeptical about the value of the humanities (especially the Academia-lifted-up ones). When you're being ground down to fine powder by a system that only sees you for the cash it can extract, who has time for that? But shared forms of creative expression need to be part of people's daily life, and don't have to include the puffery of Being Important and Western Canon and all that. I mean, wasn't Homer just writing fanfic, ultimately?
posted by rikschell at 5:43 AM on July 8, 2023 [7 favorites]

Oooh, I have data, here. The administration of the university I work at is both notably terrible at every aspect of their jobs except possibly PR, and also entirely "data"-driven: resources will be directed toward those departments that are increasing numbers of majors/graduates, and taken away from those perceived to be in decline. Couple this with my deep red state legislature's loathing of higher education on principle, and my humanities department is not permitted to replace retiring faculty while the computer science department gets a space-age remodel. Nothing is taken into account except the bottom line on spreadsheets: it's almost comical.

From the students' perspective, it's much less comical. My university is comparatively inexpensive, but that doesn't mean it's cheap, so these students, who are well aware of the student debt trap, are absolutely consumed with the direct and quantifiable ROI of their undergraduate degree: there is essentially no one here who is getting a college education in order to broaden their intellectual horizons, because they can't afford that. Most students here are first-gen college students, and the plurality are from immigrant families: their degree is first and foremost a way to help their nuclear family, much more than it is an expression of their own desire for education. Most of them are smart enough to understand the contradiction. So, computer science has increased hugely while everything else except biology has declined, and the more floofy the subject, the greater the decline: religious studies is dead and philosophy almost so.

But, whereas up until 2018 or so, comp sci undergrads could get decent jobs upon graduation, this has cratered even faster than the humanities. All the coding jobs go to people from India paid literally in peanuts, and all the comp sci grads here are working at Jimmy John's. It's about to get even worse, because AI is going to replace most coding jobs. You would not believe the amount of ostrich-heading the administration is doing about this: nope, nothing to see here, your comp sci degree will tooootally get you a job. Were I not already planning on leaving academia entirely, it might be interesting to see what happens over the next few years.
posted by outgrown_hobnail at 5:46 AM on July 8, 2023 [7 favorites]

Link doesn't work for me. Is this pay walled? It only goes to a sign up page.
posted by Jane the Brown at 5:50 AM on July 8, 2023

About half of the people born since 1600 have been born in the past 100 years... What are the odds that the greatest writer would have been born in 1564? The Bayesian priors aren’t very favorable.

Shakespeare coined a number of phrases that are still in use today, 500 years later:

"In a pickle," like the current situation of Sam Bankman-Fried.

"Vanish into thin air," like the funds that customers entrusted to Sam Bankman-Fried.

"There's a method in my madness," like what Sam Bankman-Fried insists there is (it's half-true at least.)

"As dead as a doornail," like the credibility of Sam Bankman-Fried and all the other EA dorks.
posted by AlSweigart at 5:54 AM on July 8, 2023 [14 favorites]

Around 40 years ago my IBM Branch Manager told me that if you can't measure something, then you can't manage it. (That might have been right after he got back from some MBA seminar)
This may have coincided with the gradual change from management actually going out and talking to customers to just sending out surveys. It's lazy.
More recently, when I was working customer support for Oracle medical software, a new 'tool' came out. It featured a dashboard with lots of pie charts, so I knew that it was not a worker tool, but a manager tool.

I mostly refuse to answer any of those requests asking me to rate something on a 1-5 or 1-10 scale, unless something was really terrible. If you honestly report that something was 'fine', that's considered bad.

I was listening to a book (wish I could remember the name) where the author was talking about MBA's as managers. He said it was no surprise that MBA's were terrible to work for, but he said the numbers showed the MBA's were bad for business as well.
posted by MtDewd at 6:19 AM on July 8, 2023 [5 favorites]

What are the odds that the greatest writer would have been born in 1564? The Bayesian priors aren’t very favorable.

Reducing something subjective to "odds" is a huge blind spot; the elevation of Shakespeare from 'dude who writes plays' to 'master playwright' is centuries of evaluation and re-evaluation by people over and over in agreement. Like, I think it was the early 19th century before he was really considered a great playwright, but one dude 'realizing' the opposite in 2023 isn't going to change that.

Ignoring the thousands, if not millions, of people who went 'yeah, Shakespeare rocks' with the reduction of "psh, he's one of only 500,000 people who were alive, what are the odds" shows a lack of understanding of why things are considered good.

And he isn't the first person to think Shakespeare is overrated; he just happens to have the stupidest argument supporting his opinion.
posted by AzraelBrown at 7:00 AM on July 8, 2023 [13 favorites]

Every version of this stupid argument, citing the "collapse" of enrollment in humanities majors over the past decade as proof of some kind of cultural value shift, ignores that enrollment in arts majors has actually slightly increased over the past decade in the US. So if we're collectively turning away from the qualitative and toward the quantitative, why are creative arts an exception, enrollment-wise? It's not like career prospects or job security in the arts have improved in the past decade, so why that increase in the midst of "collapse"?

(Because maybe it's economic forces driving the choices of young adults, and as the world looks more bleak and inaccessible to them they are defaulting to what are perceived as "safe" choices, to try to insure their future livelihoods? Maybe it's actually mostly young adults trying to be existentially practical, and not philosophical, in a culture that is making it increasingly difficult to achieve material security at all, imagine that.)
posted by LooseFilter at 8:01 AM on July 8, 2023 [3 favorites]

About half of the people born since 1600 have been born in the past 100 years... What are the odds that the greatest writer would have been born in 1564? The Bayesian priors aren’t very favorable.

The odds are good considering the social freedom that rarely exists in history. Traveling acting troupes before the golden age of theater (1570s-1640s) were known as vagabonds or thieves, and needed permission by a lord to even travel their private roads. When they stopped in a town, they needed permission from the mayor and a space to collect ticket sales, like a courtyard of a tavern, but this was kept by the innkeeper. Then one day a town hall opened for theatrical use in London, and a dedicated venue was born. Dress rehearsals originated as the first performance for the town censors. Queen Elizabeth famously approved of this theatrical trend, maybe because bear and bull baiting were repulsive. So a theater district suddenly emerged, producers charging customers, keeping the money, and then paying writers, due to increased competition. Studios that produced plays were born, and Shakespeare made his living at it. It suddenly came crashing down in a generation after Queen Elizabeth's death, playhouse timbers used to build wealthy Tudor homes. Back to normal conservative times. The only comparable period would be Hollywood itself.
posted by Brian B. at 8:53 AM on July 8, 2023 [12 favorites]

I loved being a humanities major, but I (and the parents and the taxpayers) would have been hugely better off if I simply could have IQ-tested into law school or finance at age 18.
posted by MattD at 10:00 AM on July 8, 2023

Without getting into what the IQ test actually selects for and whether you're doing a Bell Curve, it's not as if other countries don't have aptitude testing based placement systems, and the evidence from them regarding their overall societal benefit is equivocal, at least as I understand it.

Probably too far afield to dig into here.

CTL+F: Tufte? Nope. Weird.

edwardtufte.com
posted by snuffleupagus at 10:36 AM on July 8, 2023 [1 favorite]

Why is not mentioning Tufte weird? He has no direct connection to the article's topic.
posted by mark k at 12:05 PM on July 8, 2023 [5 favorites]

The point of quantitative metrics, whether in physics or in assessing the productivity of minimum wage workers, is that they're portable across contexts and can be aggregated. They allow the transmission of information with fidelity, generalization across large fields, and comparison without the exercise of judgment. The problem is that most numbers you make up are going to be at best very lossy measures of anything significant.

Anyway this is all background to the point I wanted to make, which is that quantitative assessments are what you insist on if you want to exercise distant, centralized control over some large-scale activity.* You can't use qualitative assessments because they're too contextual and don't scale. If you rely on them, you wind up delegating too much to people close to the activity, who have their own agendas which probably aren't yours.

So e.g. if you want to exercise top-down control over a large university system, you insist that everyone's research and teaching are subject to regular quantitative assessments. Even if the numbers are close to meaningless, they are a good tool of centralized authority. Or consider the test-based evaluation of US public schools championed by GW Bush. It's almost impossible to compare the teaching value-add of schools, because they differ radically in student populations, the students and teachers are under selection, etc. So test-based measurements don't actually tell you a lot about their ostensible objects. But they do provide a bureaucratic mechanism for taking power away from decentralized actors like teachers and principals, who by coincidence are overwhelmingly drawn from hostile constituencies. So it's still a win.

So if "the McNamara fallacy" is growing in influence, I think we should see that not as a pure cultural phenomenon but as a reflection of the organization of authority.

Money is a complicated example because it's both a measure and a good. Paying someone a wage both measures the value of their contribution and gives them control over a share of output. In some ways, this makes it better than other measures, because you can't just invent whatever number you want as a price, you also have to actually pay / accept it. (This is the magic, if you swing that way, this is the core of the Hayekian knowledge argument.)

But nobody actually thinks monetary value is the same thing as value value, and it's certainly not the same thing as social value. You can pay someone to do something that is valuable to you but harmful to the world as a whole (like assassinating someone you don't like, or lying about global warming, or making an investment that blows up the global financial system). The enormous growth in student loan debt functions as a discipline that forces students to see value in narrow monetary terms (this is partly on purpose, we know because in the '70s people just came out and said it). When you get to college, you might be tempted to think about your course of study in terms of, What is actually worthy? What would I enjoy? What is intellectually engaging? What would be useful to society? But these thoughts can be repressed by the knowledge that you will be leaving with a good part of a million dollars in debt, which will tend to focus your attention on, What will maximize my private compensation?

Actually, there is good reason to think private compensation is negatively correlated with relative social contribution. Work with high positive social spillover benefit tends to be undercompensated, and work with high negative social spillover tends to be overcompensated. For example, in this paper, Weyl and collaborators suggest that the US finance industry has negative externalities equal to at least 1.5% GDP, with the result that at the margin $1 of finance compensation reduces output in the rest of the economy by at least $0.35.** By contrast, they estimate, the marginal $1 paid to a teacher produces more than $2 of social benefit.

So while it is conventional to assume that college students help society by maximizing their incomes, the truth is probably closer to the opposite.

-----
*It's possible AI could change this but if so it'll be even worse.

**The safest way to make this argument is, the private rewards of beating the market have long since exceeded the public benefits of producing accurate price information. For example, firms will spend a huge amount of money to cut <1sec margins from their trading times, but the social benefit to shaving off those fractional seconds is nil. The argument of Weyl et al. is based on estimating the size of this kind of gap. Since this is not the only way finance wastes resources, the estimates based on it are conservative estimates of the negative spillover.
posted by grobstein at 12:10 PM on July 8, 2023 [6 favorites]

Why is not mentioning Tufte weird? He has no direct connection to the article's topic.

Yes information design and the aesthetics, effectiveness and ethics of data visualization surely has no connection to this topic of "Quantitative Aesthetics?" What?

Here's a couple potentially pertinent pages on his site: Advice for effective analytical reasoning

Seeing with Fresh Eyes: Meaning, Space, Data, Truth
posted by snuffleupagus at 12:18 PM on July 8, 2023 [2 favorites]

Yes information design and the aesthetics, effectiveness and ethics of data visualization surely has no connection to this topic of "Quantitative Aesthetics?" What?

But that's not what the article is about. It's not about applying principles of aesthetics to the presentation of quantitative data. Quite the opposite: It's worried about replacing aesthetic appreciation with numerical analysis. At its crudest, box office returns and Rotten Tomatoes scores trouncing actual engagement with the art.

You said you did a Ctrl-F, but is that all you did?
posted by mark k at 3:42 PM on July 8, 2023 [4 favorites]

Have you read much Tufte? Did you notice the data vis installation art in TFA? He also makes sculpture, you know. Or are you just riffing on the comments?

Preventing the parenthetical consequences claimed by the 'fallacy' is extremely his shit, even if it's not the whole thing (for his work, or the fallacy). Do you really think he'd have nothing to say about the scientific management of the Vietnam War? Tufte knows what his field does well, and what it doesn't and thinks others should too.

If you think the pages I linked have nothing in them that has to do with this, well, I think you've completely missed the boat.
posted by snuffleupagus at 3:58 PM on July 8, 2023 [1 favorite]

Try this, from The Cognitive Style of Powerpoint:

Years before today's slideware, presentations at companies such as IBM and in the military used bullet lists shown by overhead projectors. Then, in 1984, a software house developed a presentation package, "Presenter," which was eventually acquired by Microsoft and turned into PowerPoint.

This history is revealing, for the metaphor behind the PP cognitive style is the software corporation itself. That is, a big bureaucracy engaged in computer programming (deeply hierarchical, nested, highly structured, relentlessly sequential, one-short-line-at-a-time) and in marketing (fast pace, misdirection, advocacy not analysis, slogan thinking, branding, exaggerated claims, marketplace ethics). To describe a software house is to describe the PowerPoint cognitive style. Why should the structure, activities, and values of a large commercial bureaucracy be a useful metaphor for our presentations? Could any metaphor be worse? Voice-mail menu systems? Billboards? Television? Stalin?

The pushy PP style imposes itself on the audience and, at times, seeks to set up a dominance relationship between speaker and audience. The speaker, after all, is making power points with bullets to followers. Such aggressive, stereotyped, over-managed presentations—the Great Leader up on the pedestal—are characteristic of hegemonic systems:

The Roman state bolstered its authority and legitimacy with the trappings of ceremony Power is a far more complex and mysterious quality than any apparently simple manifestation of it would appear. It is as much a matter of impression, of theatre, of persuading those over whom authority is wielded to collude in their subjugation. Insofar as power is a matter of presentation, its cultural currency in antiquity (and still today) was the creation, manipulation, and display of images. In the propagation of the imperial office, at any rate, art was power.

posted by snuffleupagus at 4:17 PM on July 8, 2023 [2 favorites]

Yes, I've read two of Tufte's books, plus plenty of other shorter comments and summaries. I guess we just disagree about the point of the article. I don't see it complaining about the style of presentation of data, or even the substance of the data at hand, but rather how far even thinking the sort of data is relevant totally misses the mark. Even after reading your comments and links I don't see the connection. Vive la difference, I suppose.
posted by mark k at 4:57 PM on July 8, 2023 [5 favorites]

Whelp. I tried?

(I'll throw Paul N. Edwards' The Closed World: Computers and the Politics of Discourse in Cold War America in here while I'm at it.)

Tojours la difference! Especially the unmeasurable kind.
posted by snuffleupagus at 5:04 PM on July 8, 2023

Tufte actually discusses almost exactly this topic in a chapter of Beautiful Evidence (2006). He talks about the "economisting" of art, in which art's price, value, and quality all get blurred together. In his characteristic style, Tufte suggests that this process is absurd and also entirely unsupported by data. The text is available here.
posted by fantabulous timewaster at 6:28 PM on July 8, 2023 [2 favorites]

James Gray, of Ad Astra fame

"fame"? It wasn't a good movie.

/derail
posted by doctornemo at 11:31 AM on July 9, 2023

I feel like this sort of essay could have been written any time in the last... 50 years? Longer?

Which is a good point.
Look back to the simple quantitative measures we applied to the arts for decades, even generations, with McNamara along the way:
...pop music: Top 40, by sales.
...movies: by ticket sales.
...books: the famed New York Times list.

But yes, we've done more of this since, with developments beyond the aesthetic priming us for moar data. There's the quantified self movement. Social media (and MeFi) with likes. All kinds of digital applications with quickly generated stats and charts, from WordPress' Jetpack to computer games. And hey, evidence based medicine.

Yet at the same time we have a lot more content to chew on, especially in some fields, like tv and computer gaming, not to mention web-based writing. And plenty of room for niches. Speaking of which, it's time for me to check in on my Iain Banks and M.R. James Facebook groups.
posted by doctornemo at 11:41 AM on July 9, 2023 [1 favorite]