<story><title>A Generation Lost in the Bazaar (2012)</title><url>http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=2349257</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>OliverJones</author><text>Stone cathedrals (the ones still standing, anyhow) were built by generations of skilled craftspeople guided by a self-perpetuating hierarchy.  The hierarchy had access to, and the craftspeople had the benefit of, ways of extracting wealth from the economy.  The availability of unlimited resources allowed them to cover for plenty of mistakes.&lt;p&gt;Sure, the cathedral structures look elegant and eternal. That&amp;#x27;s because time favors the stable ones. The other ones fell down long ago. It&amp;#x27;s the same reason that the orbits of planets are seemingly so well-ordered: everthing that wasn&amp;#x27;t in such an orbit has crashed into something else and disappeared. (Look at the surface of the moon for evidence of that.)&lt;p&gt;Music and literature work like that. We think the age of Mozart was particularly wonderful, because we have Mozart&amp;#x27;s music. But there was plenty of other music in that era, most of it bellowed by bad musicians in taverns. That&amp;#x27;s not so different from today&amp;#x27;s music scene.&lt;p&gt;Why shouldn&amp;#x27;t software work like that? Why isn&amp;#x27;t Dr. Kamp&amp;#x27;s lament morally the same as the lament of the guy with the cabin in the woods? I&amp;#x27;m talking about the guy who finds himself with more and more neighbors, and grouses that &amp;quot;nobody respects the wilderness any more.&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;We all respect elegant lasting structures (fork &amp;#x2F; exec &amp;#x2F; stdin &amp;#x2F; stdout is one such structure).  a creative field with huge output will generate more elegant lasting structures. We just can&amp;#x27;t tell which ones will survive from where we sit in the middle of it all.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jancsika</author><text>&amp;gt; We think the age of Mozart was particularly wonderful, because we have Mozart&amp;#x27;s music. But there was plenty of other music in that era, most of it bellowed by bad musicians in taverns. That&amp;#x27;s not so different from today&amp;#x27;s music scene.&lt;p&gt;That&amp;#x27;s easily disproven-- even musicologists tasked with cataloging Mozart&amp;#x27;s output erroneously attributed symphonies and other pieces to him that were written by lesser known composers.&lt;p&gt;The reason attribution is such a hard problem is because it&amp;#x27;s &lt;i&gt;non-trivial&lt;/i&gt; to separate the stylistic characteristics of late 18th century courtly and sacred music from the characteristics of Mozart&amp;#x27;s music we wish to claim were inspired by his genius. (There&amp;#x27;s a great paper written I believe by Rifkin on Josquin scholarship having been circular in just this way.)&lt;p&gt;What your royal &amp;quot;we&amp;quot; finds &amp;quot;particularly wonderful&amp;quot; about the &amp;quot;age of Mozart&amp;quot; is the style, not the particular composer. And there is &lt;i&gt;plenty&lt;/i&gt; of well-written, beautiful symphonic, choral, and chamber music written by all kinds of composers of that period.&lt;p&gt;The modern world does not strive to have a composer in each and every town who can competently write compelling tonal music with the constraints of late 18th century form, texture, and counterpoint. As misguided as it may be, the longing of your royal &amp;quot;we&amp;quot; for the age of Mozart is a valid longing, regardless of what drinking songs bad musicians were playing in biergartens.</text></comment>
<story><title>A Generation Lost in the Bazaar (2012)</title><url>http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=2349257</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>OliverJones</author><text>Stone cathedrals (the ones still standing, anyhow) were built by generations of skilled craftspeople guided by a self-perpetuating hierarchy.  The hierarchy had access to, and the craftspeople had the benefit of, ways of extracting wealth from the economy.  The availability of unlimited resources allowed them to cover for plenty of mistakes.&lt;p&gt;Sure, the cathedral structures look elegant and eternal. That&amp;#x27;s because time favors the stable ones. The other ones fell down long ago. It&amp;#x27;s the same reason that the orbits of planets are seemingly so well-ordered: everthing that wasn&amp;#x27;t in such an orbit has crashed into something else and disappeared. (Look at the surface of the moon for evidence of that.)&lt;p&gt;Music and literature work like that. We think the age of Mozart was particularly wonderful, because we have Mozart&amp;#x27;s music. But there was plenty of other music in that era, most of it bellowed by bad musicians in taverns. That&amp;#x27;s not so different from today&amp;#x27;s music scene.&lt;p&gt;Why shouldn&amp;#x27;t software work like that? Why isn&amp;#x27;t Dr. Kamp&amp;#x27;s lament morally the same as the lament of the guy with the cabin in the woods? I&amp;#x27;m talking about the guy who finds himself with more and more neighbors, and grouses that &amp;quot;nobody respects the wilderness any more.&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;We all respect elegant lasting structures (fork &amp;#x2F; exec &amp;#x2F; stdin &amp;#x2F; stdout is one such structure).  a creative field with huge output will generate more elegant lasting structures. We just can&amp;#x27;t tell which ones will survive from where we sit in the middle of it all.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>dalbasal</author><text>&amp;gt;&amp;gt;Music and literature work like that.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s possible to go too far with this kind of thinking. Yes the pyramid still in pristine condition is the best built one, with all the shoddy pyramids long collapsed. That does encourage a bias. This does not mean any &amp;quot;golden era&amp;quot; thinking I necessarily fallacious, just that we need to watch out for a particular fallacy.&lt;p&gt;Between about 1967-73 a lot of good rock albums were recorded. A lot of shite too, mostly forgotten about. The filter of time applies equally to the next 7 years, but most people&amp;#x27;s record collections feature more &amp;quot;golden age albums.&amp;quot;</text></comment>