3201-3240 Notes

My comments. These are not the aphorisms--but could be. 

3201. The 'bad wiring' is that which disrupts the normal flow. Where is the short?

3205. Most times you’re just working and not considering it. That’s when art only looks interesting to you.

3208. Communication styles have significantly changed, becoming forced and wooden, often characterized by nonsequiturs and a lack of threads. Conversations that once involved hours-long phone calls with continuous dialogue have devolved into short exchanges, sometimes consisting only of a few words, emojis, or images. 

3209. On “metanorms”: Politics has always operated on them, a term coined by Robert Axelrod in the 80s. There are the normal norms that we think society abides by but it’s the metanorms that are the “real world”.

3210. Bob Seger was once asked about the lyrics of "Against the Wind" and the "Wish I didn't know now what I didn't know then" line. It's bad grammar but it's what you wanted to say, even if it's not saying anything--meaning something but you don't know exactly. 

3211. We don't take the time to properly design things. Yesterday I was experimenting with a new AI feature on on app and was frustrated by the UI/UX, and I realized in the rush to release new features we compromise a quality well-designed experience. People may have become inured to low-quality or sub-optimal experiences for the sake getting attention on social media. The book The Efficiency Paradox references this: In a culture preoccupied with automation and convenience, the side-effect of unintended inefficiency is not insignificant.

3212. We need to create a sense of inner strength when it's not practical to be always connected. Doubt will arise about myriad things, shifting over time. Connection is a way to assuage doubts and fears but they will return once the connections cease. There can also be doubts about the connections them selves.

3214. There may be a subtle yet powerful effect on your life compared to not having certain knowledge]. which perhaps has a subtle and powerful effect on the whole. 

3215. We like the story of the happy accident or fortuitous events: 2 people meeting in some odd circumstance and getting married, a happy accident that led to a hit song. They are the things that make for the best stories, which shift over time and people have a different understanding of them through the ages. Like the retelling of a dream, eventually it becomes a narrative, even if it was based on unrelated fragments. Stories are baked into the temporal linearity of life, but the initial sources of those stories are probably banal and don't have any meaning. 

3216. This is easier said than done. Most edicts, especially self-imposed, are difficult to enforce. Are they points you're interested in? Does the world need our two cents? This is why I like sharing visual art, either mine or someone else's. It's nice if people talk about it, but a personal aesthetic interaction doesn't need to be talked about, except with yourself, and perhaps written about.

3217. You know you as you as the image in the mirror, the portrait on a wall, but you're a sculpture for everyone else--an object they can walk around and choose a view they want to see. They can take a photo of that view and it's the one they refer to as you because they aren't in front of the sculpture.

3219. Think how the word "creativity" has been generalized. Does it mean productivity, innovation, imagination, resourcefulness? I think it still holds its postwar meaning having to do with work and productivity, and its connection with art as a way of self-expression and a way to happiness]. But it got redefined again in the 21st century by the Boomer and GenX  generations using the internet. Perhaps all new tools and technologies change language and thought and allow us to extrapolate the new meanings of words into action. It's a very bottom-up idea that people gravitate to because it's a manifestation of freedom, but not necessarily of democracy. Creativity can be seen as an alternative to government control, also seen as being oppressive. Combine this with the rise of rock'n'roll in the 50s and the evolution of the word is clear, and you could deduce that Jan6 was a reaction to a top-level Oppressor, that being the US government and taxation. Before Musk had  a meltdown I saw him as an artist. So the word "artist" has now been redefined by the techbros, not actual artists throughout history. It goes all the way back to the New Thought-influenced entrepreneurial work ethic which emphasized the individual's ability to "create new opportunities" by tapping into their "unique talents and imagination", redounding to feelings of childhood excitement when kids discovers a passion and want to make a mark on the world. But only a handful of people actually do that and they redefine the nomenclature even further. "Creativity" means something different to an audience of a TED talk by Eric Schmidt as opposed to David Byrne, which as to do with ideas of top-down control. Who gets to have control over ideas in the context of creativity being about the ideas and who can have them. Creativity in modernity is concerned with who can be a Player, not that anyone can play together and make a contribution. Once creativity is combined with capitalism it's largely about who can be a Player. David Byrne is a Player, and a player (true artist). Musk has always been a Player writ large, and seldom a player as artists play as a way to be joyful. It has to do with dominance and oppression, so it's wildly ironic that the techbros rail against that.

3220: Very often I'll tell myself to try something new, then realize I tried it years or decades ago. It's a testament to our motivation to keep trying to be successful, even though we know intuitively that success is elusive and can be flash-in-the-pan or a one-hit wonder. Usually those flashes in the pan come in the form of the "hit record" which typically (or anecdotally) happen when we're not trying to be successful. But at the same time, the Muse prefers to find you working.

3221. Popular comedians and comedy writers highly influence what we think is interesting and funny. Before making any kind of humorous statement, especially on social media, you have to see what the humor "temperature" is. In some tangential way, politics is bound up in what we think is collectively funny. What Trump says today is no different than a form of popular standup. Presidents (and their cabinets) are now almost completely celebrity figures that have "high ratings" in everything other than government. The legislative branch is now a gaggle of comedy writers that you'd see in an episode of Hacks, with Trump as Debra Vance. There's also the pathos element, the shadow of comedy in figures like Jackie Mason, Rodney Dangerfield or Andy Kaufman.

3223. Instead of just focusing on art, music or writing, focus on the combinations of them. Each element may have been created by humans or machines but we synthesize everything into one unique experience. AI might be able to do that as well, but I don't think we want machines to do everything that we used to find meaningful and satisfying.

3224. AI isn't a skill yet, just as computers weren't a skill when people started buying PCs in the 1970s. New technologies produce new skills for some people but most people are Users at some level which may or may not require skills, yet they create more work. A washing machine as a new technology a century ago required skills to mass-produce them, but the housewife, while having a new convenience, didn't get any new real skills. Laundry was still a chore that took time away from other things she might want to do. Computers were different in that they produced new skills at the hardware level: one could build a computer from scratch. The people who had those skills also could use software more easily, and perhaps could also create it. The same thing is happening now with AI, but it's all at the coding and software levels. Now that software mostly runs in a browser we're disabused of having to install it and be trained on how to use it. We can learn things by interacting online, and search for answers through chatbots. AI is doing the same thing in that they didn't have the effect of creating new skills at the level of a person making them and not producing any rigorous skills--just as washing machines didn't. We're disabused of the manual "washboard" and "ringer" aspects, and hanging clothes on a line. Like the housewife who got her first washing machine in the 1940s or 1950s, could do other things that might interest her like reading novels or engaging with what was culturally significant at the time, perhaps watching TV or talking on the telephone. AI would be seen as useful to some people if it were more like a washing machine: simply making things simpler and using the saved time to become skillful at something else, even if useless. The important thing is to have skills and use (work at) them every day. Play may result in unique skills, but will require work to cultivate them. The problem is that conveniences steer us away from skill. The housewife in the 1950s may have had unique skills but they went to seed by watching TV and talking on the telephone.

3225. Time itself is different from history, which shows that time can repeat itself and we don't just travel for light years on straight roads.

3227. In music, the quality of the words to be singable means more than what the overall meaning is. You could take 2 unrelated couplets and they world work perfectly in a song, yet still puzzle listeners. If there was a metronome or beat running in the background while someone was speaking, some words and phrases would align with it. This is when they start to become singable and can become a basis for lyrics. But music has very strict constraints on word use based on their ability to be sung and the meaningfulness of the rhymes. This is where meaning takes a turn: to make lyrics meaningful sometimes requires quite a bit of wordsmithing or a sculpting of words, which might cause you to change your original meaning and let the arrangement of words tell you what the pieces is about. Also, the interesting thing about using AI to generate music for existing lyrics is that they can be about anything. I personally use AI to generate music based on specific events in my diary entries, such as Oprah's final show in 2011. It seems sill or mundane, but it's something we couldn't (or wouldn't) do before because it wasn't worth the effort. Now it's the new novelty song.

3228. If an older technology or skill becomes obsolete, so does the aspiration to those technologies and skills. Old dreams and aspirations get replaced by new dreams and aspirations, and the question is whether they are equivalent aspirations.

3229. If things are too fun and exciting it can give us the impression that it's somehow unstable or unreliable, which is why we might want things like boring banks, boring politics, and boring routines. "Safe not sorry" rules the day, or even a lifetime.

3230. People will not always like your ideas and/or they have their own. The Beatles are the prime example of a band whose members all wanted to have their ideas taken seriously. So you have to "thrown your own party" (Do a solo album--which they all did). Brian Eno always preferred to work alone because as a producer he knew that band democracies are difficult when it comes to creativity.

3231. If you only have 1 or 2 synthesizers, as opposed to 10 or 20, you're less likely to run experiments.

3233. People change because of the influence of other people, primarily a dominant spouse, but could be a hero, a mentor, teacher, celebrity, politician, or a even a cult leader.

3234. Take for example web surfing in the late 90s--seen as  new skill that everyone wanted to acquire, thinking that could be their next job when it's like breathing now. The same thing will happen with AI, where there will be new jobs created using AI, but will be where web surfing is now. The real high-level skills in jobs are only done by  a small number of scientists or technopreneurs, not college grads getting their first jobs.

3235. What is the ratio of seemingly profound thoughts to cliches? Perhaps it's a good thing for profound insights to be cliches because they become embedded in collective thought and are tacitly implied and become high context. But even then, what we knew as the rule of law as high context has become low context--where a convicted felon can become president of the United States, and operates on the cliche, "an eye for an eye", yet twists it to his advantage. Human universals are in a sense cliches because they are something everyone collectively knows as a high-context rule. But the postmodern world allows us to operate as if anything goes, a low-context rule.

3236. When you're older, experimenting with new ways of working means less than experimenting the way you always have. Both are experiments with the same result: making something that you excites you and that you find interesting. The difference is the fact the new tools were given to you rather than your finding or making new tools or processes. (5/2025) [Just as I was writing this I stumbled on an entry from my diary in May 1998: "When shopping for a pair of casual slacks I got pressured into buying a whole ensemble of dress clothes. I felt so victimized as two salespersons insisted on making my choices for me. (The artist in me really balked at that idea)."  It's important for artists to balk at things. It doesn't mean you're ossified--it means you've stood your artist ground. At the same time it's important for artists to experiment with new technologies while being wary of them stealing their real intentions or authenticity.

3237. I once had a conversation with a dentist--probably very wealthy--who didn't know that the sun was a star, or how the equinoxes and solstices worked.

3238. There can also be metaphorical truths that more people believe in. Religions can be based on powerful metaphorical truths.

3239. The first thing you notice is very often the first thing that is forgotten. [We notice flaws when we first see or hear something but fades into the background with repeated exposure. This is an insidious cognitive flaw because we fail to address the flaws and rather normalize them. This is why it's important to make changes with fresh ears and eyes. I know a piece is done when it stops bothering me. But it might still bother other people in other ways. Art works when the consensus accepts flaws and is perhaps endeared by them, as just being wabi-sabi.

3240. Perhaps Sting as a solo artist would not have been as successful if he didn't do the raw pop/punk material in The Police.