Refinement Culture
There has been a subtle shift in the last 20 years in a some aspects of life. It has to do with refinement of things, games, products and aesthetics. It’s hard to describe exactly WHAT Refinement Culture really means. It’s easier for me to show you some of these changes you may or may not have noticed. And through the examples, a definition will be fleshed out.
Let’s start with professional sports. I think you can clearly see some of the symptoms of refinement culture there. Then we can move on to other areas.
Sports — NBA
If you look at the graphic above you will see how the game of professional basketball has changed over the last twenty years. You can probably notice it if you’ve been watching for a long time. Gone is the mid-range jumper that players like Michael Jordan and Karl Malone built their careers on. 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. Data is collected using cameras that record every movement of both the ball and all 10 players 25 times per second. Data analytics has brought an explosion in attempts for three-point shots. In 2012, teams averaged about 18 three-point attempts per game. In 2017, that number reached 27.
Why? It’s really just common sense and math, backed up by data. Essentially, data showed that the reward of taking a three-point shot outweighed the risk. On average, teams that take more three-point shots ultimately score more points over the course of a game. The Golden State Warriors, who won a ton of championships the past few years are a perfect example of this philosophy. Other teams have followed.
Teams also crunch large data sets on defenders for other teams. They determine where they had the most and least amount of success against various offensive attacks, such as long range shots, midrange jumpers and driving the lane to the basket. Teams then take that information to isolate a player who is good in one area against a defender who isn’t. The flipside is true, as well. Teams attempt to get their defenders on a specific player, particularly in critical situations, if that defender has a statistically better chance of preventing a score. The entire game has changed over the last 20 years because of technology, data science and math.
Looking at the picture above feels like seeing a once bio-diverse land, teeming with all sorts of flora and fauna, reduced to rats and weeds.
Where do we see this with other sports?
Sports — Soccer
Total volume from outside the box continues to decline year on year in the English Premier League. From 7.2 per team per game in 08/09 to 4.7 last season. Conversion rate (goals scored) has doubled in that time.
% of all shots from inside the box continues to rise year on year. Now almost 9% higher than in 08/09. This is all due to Soccer teams using data analytics to change the way they play. The game today does not resemble the game from 10, 15, 20, 30, 40 years ago. It may never go back to those times and style. This could be permanent style for the majority of teams and games over the next few decades.
You can read more on how teams like Liverpool are using analytics and how it’s changing how they play.
Sports — Baseball
Baseball was the arguably the first sport to embrace the data analytics revolution. It was called the Moneyball era of the 2000s and introduced many new stats that I didn’t know existed. There is an emphasis on walks combined with increased strikeouts due to better pitching & more willingness to play high-strikout prone batters in exchange for power/HRs. All of this is driven by data.
This year, you’re waiting on average, 3 minutes and 52 seconds between balls in play, a record. If you watch a fair amount of old baseball games on YouTube you notice (eyeball test only) that the games moved along a crisp pace. It was rare that a game went +2.5 hours. Much more enjoyable to watch. Batters stepped up to the box ready to hit, and they didn’t really leave the box. Pitchers got the ball back and threw. There was no walking around, no fussing on the rubber, adjusting your batting gloves. But every at-bat is more refined now. More rituals at the plate, more strategy, more stats, more everything….
Singles and steals in baseball have gone the way of mid-range jumpers in basketball, just as homers and strikeouts have increased alongside three-pointers.
Outcome maximalization across sports has created “smarter” games with less variety and more all-or-nothing play. The fixation with quantifiable success can lead to a collective flattening of the human experience. Perhaps we need to include more randomness in the game. Each home field or home court should have distinctive features, different playing surfaces, or outdoor elements. Think of how fun the wrigley field ivy is, or the boston green wall. Maybe put a dog or cat on the playing field.
Only randomness can save the sport from becoming boring. And sports after all is just another genre of entertainment.
Sports — Aesthetics
The data analytics revolution along with technology has changed sports for good. But there is another element other than style of play or strategy. There is aesthetics in sports. Let’s look at how Olympic gym routines have changed over the years:
https://twitter.com/farbodsaraf/status/765989177951416320?s=20
https://twitter.com/farbodsaraf/status/765989177951416320?s=20
https://twitter.com/farbodsaraf/status/765989177951416320?s=20
Olympics: Greek ideal of ἀρετή, at human scale.
Circus: exploitation of deformities, unscaled
Current Olympics: exploitation of deformities!
Awesome Ted talk on ‘are athletes actually getting faster?’ Technology has improved, better selection of body types, genetics & mindset..plus weird athletes have gotten weirder! Take Phelps & El Guerrouj — 7inches difference in height but same leg length youtu.be/8COaMKbNrX0
https://twitter.com/PeterHorobinUK/status/1075346127988379648?s=20
Modernity turned Olympic athletes into Roman gladiators, captives.
The Greek ideal was to never do activities that reduce one’s humanity.
Andre Agassi & his wife Stefi Graf (both famous tennis players) forbade their children from taking up tennis because he saw his career as performing like a gladiator.
In the early Olympic games, the British were shocked and appalled when they found that the Americans trained for competitions.
If you’re interested in athletics as it once was, slightly premodern, run on a clay cinder track, jumpers still doing the straddle, beautifully filmed, see The Tokyo Olympics in 1964. Based on physiques, It looks like there’s not too much steroid (another aspect of refinement culture) taking yet.
Brand Logos
Let’s shift away from sports and on to another topic of refinement culture. Let’s discuss contemporary logos. The current aesthetic is supposed to be “clean” and frictionless. They are de-aging skin, smoothing hair, and brightening his eyes. They could be trying to make him look “healthy”.
For some reason they made the Quaker Oats man younger, slimmer and virile. Why? I have no clue. What does this have to do with Oats? I have no idea.
They did it to Captain Highliner too. Now he’s Silver Fox captain.
They shaved Little Caesar’s chest.
Chuck E Cheese with one of the biggest downgrades. He’s thinner, wearing tight pants, looks “healthier” and more “realistic”. But it all ends up somehow just weird and disorientating. CGI is a step back. It looks more “refined”, but it also ends up looking bad, ugly and it doesn’t mean much.
Automobiles
I remember growing up and driving and being in the passenger seat of cars. Every car would be a different world. It’d be a totally different experience, both riding in it, driving it, the aesthetics, the interior and if it would even last. They were distinct! I now get into an uber (I don’t drive much anymore) and it’s all the same thing. If it’s a newish car made in the past 5–10 years, it’s all the same. What make? What model? It doesn’t matter. It’s all pretty good. They all run smooth. They all have electronics on the dashboard.
Let’s take a look at some of the cars I’ve driven in my life:
Driving the Saab really made me feel like a character from a Godard film from the 60s.
Cell Phones
People are constantly talking about different phones to buy like there’s a difference.
All the phones are the same now. Just like the cars. The only exception is the extreme upper limit of cars $150,000+ and up.
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.
Writing Style
They created some AI called GPT-3 that you can code to write articles.
It managed to get the top of Hacker News without anyone realizing it wasn’t a real person writing it.
GPT-3 Blog gets to top of Hacker News: — “not only did people not realize they were reading generated text, but they enjoyed the writing…” — “Buzzfeed Inc. has 1700 employees with an average base salary for a writer being 42k” liamp.substack.com/p/my-gpt-3-blo…
https://twitter.com/jeetsidhu_/status/1291072069069950976?s=20
The AI has managed to copy mid to late 2000s internet writing aesthetic pretty well. This style is a mix of academic-corporate speak which most internet writing has clustered into. This is mostly what the style of the publications like the New Yorker, popular intellectual magazines and popular blogs write in. When you read writing from this genre you can’t distinguish the author, because they all write the same.
The writing style is clustered into one form at the top
Look at this Standard middlebrow internet article writing below that the AI generated:
This type of writing is what you see everywhere. It’s easy to mimic. GPT-3 cannot mimic the LindyMan style
“You exist in full if and only if your conversation (or writings) can not be easily reconstructed with clips from other conversations. “ — Bed of Procrustes
Optimization
Everyone is taking vitamins now. Trying to “optimize” their health and nutrients. Optimization is a component of refinement culture. The body is a complex system and systems cannot really optimize; optimization leads to nonlinear increase in hidden risks which invariably blows up the apparatus.
In human relationships we can’t optimize without becoming greedy selfish unethical crooks. And in commerce we prefer relations to transactions, ready to support the local butcher because we feel we are part of a community and we are not alone — we are paid back with a smile and someone who says hello in the street. Indeed the central flaw in optimization is thinking that “everything else” ceases to exist and makes people think the individual, not the collective, is the true unit — when such thinking blows up the system. We humans are punished when we try to optimize, as if we suddenly ceased to be humans.
Vitamins
https://twitter.com/SimonDeDeo/status/1295059432976666624?s=20
https://twitter.com/SimonDeDeo/status/1295059432976666624?s=20
There’s a general principle in play when talking about megadosing huge amounts of vitamins: evolution is an amazing engineer, and we are optimized *enough* for survival already. If we mess around too much we’ll get cancer or go crazy.
Multivitamin supplement stuff turned out bogus and even dangerous
e.g., Vitamin A should have protected from lung cancer — but probably causes it
and new data suggest the same for Vitamin B-12 supplements
Huge industry, but basically zero positive effects and possibly many negatives
all based on the idea that you could take one component of a healthy diet and mega-dose it in a pill
In the best studies, and over and over again, long term micronutrient megadosing *fails* to improve health outcomes, and sometimes makes them worse. But why? In general, hopes of finding a chemical fountain of youth are often based on association studies (people with good outcomes have X in their blood), along with a plausible mechanism for why X is causal — most commonly, that X has “anti-oxidant” or “protective” effects. Having established this, supplement companies then prepare megadoses of X far in excess of what can be achieved by diet alone. When randomized control trial studies finally get around to determining the effects of these treatments — many years after the money has been made — the results are less than disappointing. Vitamin A, D, and E megadoses are associated with significant *increases* in cancer incidence.
Attempting to alter basic blood chemistry should be done with caution
Here’s the human metabolic network. Look how complex it is. You’re going to start megadosing everyday and wreck this thing.
The takeaway from this image is that biochemistry is non-linear. There are loops and feedback processes that maintain systems in homeostasis.
Imagine you notice schools that give kids math homework have better outcomes. On the basis of this, you increase math homework 100x.
Excellent reasons to believe that math homework is causally relevant to doing well in math. But with homework megadosing either…
1. everyone ignores the extra assignments, and carries on as before. Homeostasis.
2. other subjects are neglected, etc. — unindented side-effects.
One pair of interventions that reliably does have effects visible in randomized control studies: Calorie restriction / fasting, and exercise. This appears to work because they *increase* stress on the body temporarily (hormesis).
Surgery and Cosmetics
Women all wear the same makeup now. They all look kind of like Kim Kardashian. People who are aging are getting the same type of surgery: fillers, botox, etc. You’re seeing appearances converge into a few “looks”.
AirBnbs
Here are some articles on why there is the same look to expensive AirBnBs, the gentrification chic. It’s all refinement culture
1) https://www.ft.com/content/6996e7f2-7446-43e5-9c31-2606b9e316b7
2) https://www.theverge.com/2016/8/3/12325104/airbnb-aesthetic-global-minimalism-startup-gentrification
