If dreams are the cure to our overfitting on our individual learning, then works of art are the dreams of the culture. Part of the explanation for an overfitted culture is a deficiency of dreams (which is also caused by the overfitted culture--it's a feedback loop).
I often complain to family and friends that algorithmic recommendations on Spotify etc. have completely broken down because the algorithms are now learning from their own recommendations. I listen to artist A, so Spotify thinks that I will like artist B because lots of people that listen to artist A also listen to artist B. But at this point in the history of algorithmic content, people that listen to artist A listen to artist B *because Spotify suggested it*. This creates a downward spiral, maybe something like a model collapse of recommendation engines where you are just being recommended music which represents the average of whatever genre you're spending the most time in.
The reason this is so awful is that artists now are slave to these recommendations. Human consciousness has been all but removed from the process by which artists "make it" (of course not entirely because, of course, labels still pay to have their artists recommended by Spotify) and instead they are mostly doing whatever they can to be picked up by Spotify's recommendation algorithm or TikTok creators that will make their song viral through TikTok's algorithm. The result is that artists are encouraged to make average-sounding music, because that's what's recommended by the algorithm. Not because anyone wants that, just because of the dynamics of such a system.
Spotify is just the place where this is happening most acutely, but clearly it's happening with movies and books as well.
I have some hope that eventually the tide will turn and people will become so sick of the stagnancy that they will begin to actively seek out actual cultural dreams, and slowly they will start to be encouraged even more so than ever before once we have some awareness of their actual importance.
>> The reason this is so awful is that artists now are slave to these recommendations. Human consciousness has been all but removed from the process by which artists "make it" (of course not entirely because, of course, labels still pay to have their artists recommended by Spotify) and instead they are mostly doing whatever they can to be picked up by Spotify's recommendation algorithm or TikTok creators that will make their song viral through TikTok's algorithm. The result is that artists are encouraged to make average-sounding music, because that's what's recommended by the algorithm. Not because anyone wants that, just because of the dynamics of such a system.
That's such a perfect example. And it literally fits the discriminatory overfitting we see with GANs!
I am hardly an expert on culture in other countries, but I have noticed that there's a lot of thematic and formal diversity in foreign films that we just don't have in this country. Material forces beyond just the changes brought about by social media are shaping our culture here.
Ah sorry sent too early. Different than American films? Or alternatively that you’re not seeing a selection bias, where only standout-creative foreign films are worth translating/exporting/showing, but local films are less original because they’re not under that filter?
Here's another idea: stagnation emerges from our socially-stratified society. The lack of interaction between the classes reduces the friction and ferment that creates culture.
This is a really interesting way to frame the problem. Really enjoyed reading this article.
I have been wondering if, because they are tired of the same algorithmically determined content all the time, people have gained more of an appetite for stuff that is very contrary to the algorithm. Things like being aggressively non-politically correct, throwing out Nazi salutes, etc. Although I guess that sort of content is just boosted by a different algorithm in a different bubble.
Nassim Taleb writes about the many problems of overfitting and lack of variance too. In his theoretical framework, an overfitted system is fragile, while the many-gardens of yours would be robust or even antifragile depending on the selection rules.
I recall several think pieces over the last decade declaring that in an algorithm-mediated world, people who wanted to cultivate good taste and seek out the creative frontier needed to rely on a new class of plugged-in connoisseurs and curators who had access to stuff that was truly innovative and untainted by optimization for some preexisting commercial incentive structure.
What happened to that? Where are the set of expert obsessives who have an encyclopedic knowledge of some niche or subgenre of art or media, and whose recommendations, because they're human and have Good Taste, we could take to the bank?
Surely these people exist, but they've been completely swamped by algorithmic recommendation engines that exploit the revealed preferences of even self-proclaimed novelty seekers for convenience and immediate gratification over the time-consuming trial-and-error process of manual discovery.
It seems that if you introduce a mechanised algorithm anywhere into the stream of human cultural evolution, you get simulacra and overfitting issues, because it creates a filter that contaminates everything downstream.
Where can we find a resource for "the best new X" that favors the novel and the avant-garde and isn't pre-contaminated?
That's very interesting. Algorithms should weight tastes for recommending. For example, I like heavy metal music, so apps should recommend new music to me that are being discovered by other people who also likes heavy metal music.
But hey, isn't that one the other complain about algorithms? The "echo chambers"?
I've experienced this in social circles in parts of the US. Some people only want to be friends that are over-fitted to them. I then later see these friendships break apart because they were founded on barely anything—not even trust. I think this is a great way of describing echo chambers and extending them to all areas of culture.
I wonder if this is a cyclical thing? I mean, we're clearly in a moment of extreme overfitting right now, but less extreme versions of this must have happened in the past. I think about different movements in art, music, or literature, and how new movements are often a reaction to an old movement growing stale. Maybe there will be a backlash against this overfitting that gets culture moving again? A close analysis of similar historic moments could give us hints if a way out.
So much to think about... almost enough to write a bestselling book about...
Really interesting read. I've thought and written about this from the other direction - basically the data science revolution that happened between 2010 and today drove all of this.
Around 2010 computers hit a point that we could start crunching Big Data, and deploying algorithms that used that data to build better-than-ever models and optimizations. It was the Data Science revolution, and it significantly changed how big companies marketed things, segmented and understood their customers, did analytics, tracked business outcomes and KPI’s, and created user interfaces.
It had precursors, of course. Computers were pretty good before then, and certain companies had been generating / storing Big Data well before then, but this is about when things took off collectively, the more powerful skills and algorithms were honed and deployed at scale, and every company that was big enough began doing it.
Basically, for about a decade, you could pull together a team of Phd’s (or those unambiguously smart enough to get a STEM Phd), and you could point them at some data and give them a business outcome or goal, and they could lift things by absurdly massive amounts, generally driving tens of millions of value per year with a team that cost only $1-2M. Bump conversion by 20-30%, drop costs by 20-50% by targeting things or using resources more intelligently, really dial in what factors were actually most important for driving various outcomes via modeling, segment customers in much more predictive ways, and so on. It was an arms race, of sorts - business is a competitive landscape, and those deltas are too big to ignore.
Another more telling way to look at this, is that ten thousand Phd’s in every major company have now for years been coordinating and arbitraging against average people by creating and using vastly imbalanced world-models and optimization power.
They're creating and deploying incredibly fine-grained and insightful models of consumer behavior and motivations, which reach deep into our collective biology and neurology to identify, grasp, and yank on whatever hooks exist for altering people’s behavior at large. They’re discovering and creating biologically-grounded addictive superstimuli, in other words - Skinner boxes writ large.
One outcome that came from this was the fundamentally adversarial dynamics that we see more and more of in our digital and physical lives now - junk food, the "attention economy" making phone time grow from 2-3 hours per day in 2014 to 7-9 hours a day in Zennials today, online gambling, and more.
And apparently it had still more repercussions beyond adversarial systems - those feedback loops and models have boxed in our cultural production into the safest, "known to make money" zones, and this has led to the stagnation you're pointing to.
Fortunately, on this cultural front, we have options - there is such an immense reservoir of music, shows, and books that you could consume constantly for 12 hours a day for 100 years and literally never run out of any one. So all you need to do is find real-life tastemakers you respect to mine those content reservoirs for gold.
Excellent essay Erik, thank you, stimulating as always! I have been thinking lately that a Revival of the True Weird could be one antidote / countermedicine to the Overfitting you describe here. I have a sense that humanness inheres in flaws & imperfections: that maybe it was a hubristic desire for flawlessness that led us into this mess in the first place— but that 'perfection' does indeed turn out to be very boring. (Those old Zen masters were right after all...) If so, maybe being more shit on purpose can confound the clankers? My two cents
Erik, as an extension of your point, consider whether "stagnation" is effectively the result of socially, twice-overfitted phenomena. For example, if someone experiencing audience capture would have deviated from their message, in form or content, but for the perceived demand of their audience, and if that same audience thinks itself a captive audience (an audience that would deviate in attention or demand, but for the perceived lack of alternatives) then both parties ("content creator" and their audience) are overfitting to the same faulty signals that survive and self-reinforce.
Effectively, this is runaway pluralistic ignorance, and stagnation via lack of deviation is downstream of this double overfitting. When burst like an economic bubble, it might reveal creativity to have been ongoing, but trapped in "the spiral of silence" where everyone presumed their creativity would not be valued, increasingly inferred from the growing absence of such valuations.
If dreams are the cure to our overfitting on our individual learning, then works of art are the dreams of the culture. Part of the explanation for an overfitted culture is a deficiency of dreams (which is also caused by the overfitted culture--it's a feedback loop).
I often complain to family and friends that algorithmic recommendations on Spotify etc. have completely broken down because the algorithms are now learning from their own recommendations. I listen to artist A, so Spotify thinks that I will like artist B because lots of people that listen to artist A also listen to artist B. But at this point in the history of algorithmic content, people that listen to artist A listen to artist B *because Spotify suggested it*. This creates a downward spiral, maybe something like a model collapse of recommendation engines where you are just being recommended music which represents the average of whatever genre you're spending the most time in.
The reason this is so awful is that artists now are slave to these recommendations. Human consciousness has been all but removed from the process by which artists "make it" (of course not entirely because, of course, labels still pay to have their artists recommended by Spotify) and instead they are mostly doing whatever they can to be picked up by Spotify's recommendation algorithm or TikTok creators that will make their song viral through TikTok's algorithm. The result is that artists are encouraged to make average-sounding music, because that's what's recommended by the algorithm. Not because anyone wants that, just because of the dynamics of such a system.
Spotify is just the place where this is happening most acutely, but clearly it's happening with movies and books as well.
I have some hope that eventually the tide will turn and people will become so sick of the stagnancy that they will begin to actively seek out actual cultural dreams, and slowly they will start to be encouraged even more so than ever before once we have some awareness of their actual importance.
>> The reason this is so awful is that artists now are slave to these recommendations. Human consciousness has been all but removed from the process by which artists "make it" (of course not entirely because, of course, labels still pay to have their artists recommended by Spotify) and instead they are mostly doing whatever they can to be picked up by Spotify's recommendation algorithm or TikTok creators that will make their song viral through TikTok's algorithm. The result is that artists are encouraged to make average-sounding music, because that's what's recommended by the algorithm. Not because anyone wants that, just because of the dynamics of such a system.
That's such a perfect example. And it literally fits the discriminatory overfitting we see with GANs!
I am hardly an expert on culture in other countries, but I have noticed that there's a lot of thematic and formal diversity in foreign films that we just don't have in this country. Material forces beyond just the changes brought about by social media are shaping our culture here.
Are you sure you aren’t just noticing that foreign films are different than
Ah sorry sent too early. Different than American films? Or alternatively that you’re not seeing a selection bias, where only standout-creative foreign films are worth translating/exporting/showing, but local films are less original because they’re not under that filter?
I would buy and read this book. This essay alone contains the seeds for a hundred new lines of inquiry and exploration.
Here's another idea: stagnation emerges from our socially-stratified society. The lack of interaction between the classes reduces the friction and ferment that creates culture.
This is a really interesting way to frame the problem. Really enjoyed reading this article.
I have been wondering if, because they are tired of the same algorithmically determined content all the time, people have gained more of an appetite for stuff that is very contrary to the algorithm. Things like being aggressively non-politically correct, throwing out Nazi salutes, etc. Although I guess that sort of content is just boosted by a different algorithm in a different bubble.
This may be the Substack essay of the year! Already planning a second run through.
Nassim Taleb writes about the many problems of overfitting and lack of variance too. In his theoretical framework, an overfitted system is fragile, while the many-gardens of yours would be robust or even antifragile depending on the selection rules.
I recall several think pieces over the last decade declaring that in an algorithm-mediated world, people who wanted to cultivate good taste and seek out the creative frontier needed to rely on a new class of plugged-in connoisseurs and curators who had access to stuff that was truly innovative and untainted by optimization for some preexisting commercial incentive structure.
What happened to that? Where are the set of expert obsessives who have an encyclopedic knowledge of some niche or subgenre of art or media, and whose recommendations, because they're human and have Good Taste, we could take to the bank?
Surely these people exist, but they've been completely swamped by algorithmic recommendation engines that exploit the revealed preferences of even self-proclaimed novelty seekers for convenience and immediate gratification over the time-consuming trial-and-error process of manual discovery.
It seems that if you introduce a mechanised algorithm anywhere into the stream of human cultural evolution, you get simulacra and overfitting issues, because it creates a filter that contaminates everything downstream.
Where can we find a resource for "the best new X" that favors the novel and the avant-garde and isn't pre-contaminated?
That's very interesting. Algorithms should weight tastes for recommending. For example, I like heavy metal music, so apps should recommend new music to me that are being discovered by other people who also likes heavy metal music.
But hey, isn't that one the other complain about algorithms? The "echo chambers"?
I've experienced this in social circles in parts of the US. Some people only want to be friends that are over-fitted to them. I then later see these friendships break apart because they were founded on barely anything—not even trust. I think this is a great way of describing echo chambers and extending them to all areas of culture.
Honored to be mentioned in The Intrinsic Perspective! Long time fan. Was shocked to see my name.
I wonder if this is a cyclical thing? I mean, we're clearly in a moment of extreme overfitting right now, but less extreme versions of this must have happened in the past. I think about different movements in art, music, or literature, and how new movements are often a reaction to an old movement growing stale. Maybe there will be a backlash against this overfitting that gets culture moving again? A close analysis of similar historic moments could give us hints if a way out.
So much to think about... almost enough to write a bestselling book about...
Really interesting read. I've thought and written about this from the other direction - basically the data science revolution that happened between 2010 and today drove all of this.
Around 2010 computers hit a point that we could start crunching Big Data, and deploying algorithms that used that data to build better-than-ever models and optimizations. It was the Data Science revolution, and it significantly changed how big companies marketed things, segmented and understood their customers, did analytics, tracked business outcomes and KPI’s, and created user interfaces.
It had precursors, of course. Computers were pretty good before then, and certain companies had been generating / storing Big Data well before then, but this is about when things took off collectively, the more powerful skills and algorithms were honed and deployed at scale, and every company that was big enough began doing it.
Basically, for about a decade, you could pull together a team of Phd’s (or those unambiguously smart enough to get a STEM Phd), and you could point them at some data and give them a business outcome or goal, and they could lift things by absurdly massive amounts, generally driving tens of millions of value per year with a team that cost only $1-2M. Bump conversion by 20-30%, drop costs by 20-50% by targeting things or using resources more intelligently, really dial in what factors were actually most important for driving various outcomes via modeling, segment customers in much more predictive ways, and so on. It was an arms race, of sorts - business is a competitive landscape, and those deltas are too big to ignore.
Another more telling way to look at this, is that ten thousand Phd’s in every major company have now for years been coordinating and arbitraging against average people by creating and using vastly imbalanced world-models and optimization power.
They're creating and deploying incredibly fine-grained and insightful models of consumer behavior and motivations, which reach deep into our collective biology and neurology to identify, grasp, and yank on whatever hooks exist for altering people’s behavior at large. They’re discovering and creating biologically-grounded addictive superstimuli, in other words - Skinner boxes writ large.
One outcome that came from this was the fundamentally adversarial dynamics that we see more and more of in our digital and physical lives now - junk food, the "attention economy" making phone time grow from 2-3 hours per day in 2014 to 7-9 hours a day in Zennials today, online gambling, and more.
And apparently it had still more repercussions beyond adversarial systems - those feedback loops and models have boxed in our cultural production into the safest, "known to make money" zones, and this has led to the stagnation you're pointing to.
Fortunately, on this cultural front, we have options - there is such an immense reservoir of music, shows, and books that you could consume constantly for 12 hours a day for 100 years and literally never run out of any one. So all you need to do is find real-life tastemakers you respect to mine those content reservoirs for gold.
Thank you.
I've felt for some time that everything is just "same old, same old".
So it's not just that I'm 79 and have been everywhere and done everything.
Excellent essay Erik, thank you, stimulating as always! I have been thinking lately that a Revival of the True Weird could be one antidote / countermedicine to the Overfitting you describe here. I have a sense that humanness inheres in flaws & imperfections: that maybe it was a hubristic desire for flawlessness that led us into this mess in the first place— but that 'perfection' does indeed turn out to be very boring. (Those old Zen masters were right after all...) If so, maybe being more shit on purpose can confound the clankers? My two cents
Erik, as an extension of your point, consider whether "stagnation" is effectively the result of socially, twice-overfitted phenomena. For example, if someone experiencing audience capture would have deviated from their message, in form or content, but for the perceived demand of their audience, and if that same audience thinks itself a captive audience (an audience that would deviate in attention or demand, but for the perceived lack of alternatives) then both parties ("content creator" and their audience) are overfitting to the same faulty signals that survive and self-reinforce.
Effectively, this is runaway pluralistic ignorance, and stagnation via lack of deviation is downstream of this double overfitting. When burst like an economic bubble, it might reveal creativity to have been ongoing, but trapped in "the spiral of silence" where everyone presumed their creativity would not be valued, increasingly inferred from the growing absence of such valuations.
Yay! It came out on my birthday!! Thank you.