Effort is Admirable

and Corruption is what a Lost Purpose feels like

Bishop’s Castle in Colorado

I. Effort

When Milton Freedman William Aberhart visited China Alberta he was surprised to see many men with shovels but no bulldozers or modern earth movers. When he asked about this, he was told that one bulldozer would replace over a dozen men, and this was unacceptable for a government jobs program. He replied, “If the purpose is to create jobs, you would be better off replacing their shovels with spoons.”

Wasted effort is risible, and should be mocked so people don’t intentionally waste a lot of effort. However…

In conversation at a recent rationalist meetup, I spoke of the feelings of awe and wonder that the old English cathedrals evoked in me. I shared a desire for rationalists to create a cathedral of their own some day. It was suggested to me that this could be achieved for substantially less effort via advanced 3D printing techniques in the near future, and I barely avoided a spit-take.

Short-cutting the cathedral-building process is missing a great deal of the point. One of the things that fills one with awe is the realization that all this was done by human hands, using hammer and chisel, and ropes and pulleys. A colossal amount of human effort was put into building this thing. The sheer number of hours of human labor put into carving the actual structure, not even accounting for the training of the skills or the procuring of the resources, is breath-taking. Part of what makes it inspirational is the years of life that people gave in exchange for this artifact.

Sometimes, the effort is the point.

II. Corruption

This generalizes to many domains. People value an original painting over a print, because the original took far more effort to produce. We often admire displays of great effort that have no other value, like climbing a difficult mountain. People admire feats of athleticism that are accomplished by training alone, rather than those that are assisted by steroids, because training takes a great deal of effort, whereas injecting drugs is easy. Weight-classes and sex-segregation exist for the same reason.

It’s the conspicuous display of effort that evokes awe or admiration. When one learns that the effort-signal was faked, one loses the admiration one had for another, even if the product delivered is unchanged.

This thinking is the result of my self-interrogation over why Grace Cathedral felt “corrupt.” The creators of that cathedral had the goal of making a cathedral-like structure for its own sake. They reasoned that a steel frame + poured concrete should work just fine. In doing so, they lost the true purpose of a cathedral — to produce wonder and awe in humans within it. I suspect that a sense of corruption is what being exposed to a Lost Purpose feels like from the inside.

III. Generative AI

I don’t think human artists will be replaced by AI. Being paid for art certainly will be. But much like how humans are still climbing mountains rather than taking a helicopter to the top, and other humans greatly admire them for it, the art that humans most admire will still be made by other humans. Not because it is better by an objective metric, but precisely because it is hard.

I do think there will be more emphasis on the process and less on the final product, though. This may even take the form of conspicuous limitations. Many of the structures and art installations at Burning Man are amazing on their own merits… but underlying all of them is the added wonder of the fact that they are here. The effort required to bring them out to the desert, under these conditions, in a short time frame, and knowing they will soon be removed or burned, is fairly awe-inspiring in its own right.

As I write this I am listening to a teen playing piano in Starbucks. He’s good, and I’m watching him as I type this, and he composed it himself. That’s impressive. I like this better than hearing the album release of Piano Man again. The future of art will be far more local.