I like 'em thick

我喜欢厚的

2026-08-18 · Adam Mastroianni | Experimental History (Substack) · 原文

I owe an apology to every English teacher I ever had.

我向我曾经遇到过的每一位英语老师道歉。

I always assumed that so-called “great” literature was a hoax, a punishment inflicted upon adolescents for the crime of being young.

我一直认为所谓的“伟大”文学是一个骗局，是对青少年犯下的罪行的惩罚。

These books did not have anything special about them, and covering up that fact was simply a make-work exercise for former English majors, a sort of “jobs for snobs” program.

I was wrong about this.

我在这件事上错了。

There is such thing as greatness.

有一种东西叫做伟大。

More specifically, there is such thing as thickness .

更具体地说，有厚度之类的东西。

Great works of fiction—for that matter, great works of any art—unfurl in response to your attention.

伟大的小说作品——就此而言，任何艺术领域的伟大作品——都会随着你的注意力而展开。

The more time you spend with them, the more you get out of them.

你和他们在一起的时间越多，你从他们身上得到的收获就越多。

That kind of responsiveness is so addicting that it can lead people to do crazy things, like try to teach literature to high schoolers.

这种反应是如此令人上瘾，以至于它会导致人们做出疯狂的事情，比如尝试向高中生教授文学。

But thickness is tricky, because rewarding the careful reader often means repelling the casual one.

但厚度是个棘手的问题，因为奖励细心的读者往往意味着排斥漫不经心的读者。

And this is where I would like an apology in return from my English teachers, because while this might have been obvious to them, they never made it obvious to me.

I was presented with art and literature as if it was self-explanatory, and that everything wonderful about it was plainly visible from the outside.

我看到的艺术和文学就好像它们是不言自明的，从外面就可以清楚地看到其中的一切美妙之处。

But those works were much more like dark, winding caves with treasure stashed inside of them.

但这些作品更像是黑暗、蜿蜒的洞穴，里面藏着宝藏。

My teachers were like, “Right, well, into the cave you go!” and I was like “But there’s nothing in there” and they were like “Entering the cave is 30% of your grade” and so I took a few steps into the darkness and I was like “Just as I suspected: an empty cave” and then I came trudging back out and pretended that I saw something.

我的老师说，“好吧，好吧，进入山洞吧！”我当时想，“但是里面什么都没有”，他们说“进入洞穴就是你成绩的 30%”，所以我向黑暗中走了几步，我说“正如我所怀疑的：一个空洞”，然后我艰难地走回来，假装我看到了一些东西。

But if someone had outfitted me appropriately, if they warned me that you have to bring one of those crank-up flashlights and you might have to shimmy through some narrow antechambers and spelunk through some flooded passageways, but that eventually you would reach a room full of untold riches—well, maybe I would have actually tried.

Instead, I had to learn about thickness by looking at a guy’s butt.

相反，我必须通过观察一个人的屁股来了解厚度。

For most of my life, I treated art museums like celebrity scavenger hunts.

在我一生的大部分时间里，我把艺术博物馆当作名人寻宝游戏。

The point of visiting was to see in person the thing you had seen on a screen or in a book; the goal was collection rather than contemplation.

参观的目的是亲眼看看你在屏幕或书本上看到的东西；目标是收集而不是沉思。

And so I would power-walk through the galleries, scanning the placards for famous names, rushing over whenever one of my companions would hiss, “Oh, this one’s a Van Gogh!”

因此，我会在画廊里大步走动，扫描标语牌上的名人名字，每当我的一个同伴发出嘶嘶声时，我就会冲过去，“哦，这是梵高！”

This ended when I encountered The Garden of Earthly Delights , a triptych painted by the Dutch master Hieronymous Bosch.

当我遇到荷兰大师希罗尼姆斯·博斯的三联画《人间乐园》时，这一切就结束了。

When I went to collect that one, I got stuck.

当我去收集那个时，我被困住了。

I wanted to stand in front of it forever.

我想永远站在它面前。

It’s a painting from 500 years in the past that looks like a painting from 500 years in the future.

这是一幅 500 年前的画，看上去就像是 500 年前的画。

Every corner of it is filled with “freakish riddles” and “irresponsible phantasmagoria”, in the words of art critic Wilhelm Fränger.

用艺术评论家 Wilhelm Fränger 的话说，它的每个角落都充满了“怪异的谜语”和“不负责任的幻象”。

For example, what is going on with this dude?

例如，这个家伙怎么了？

In the third panel of the triptych, there’s a scene of some instruments, some naked dudes, and some kind of pink demon with an alarmingly long tongue.

Look closely, and you’ll see one of the naked dudes has some music printed on his butt (helpfully, one of his friends is pointing at it, as if to say, “dude you have some music on your butt”).

仔细观察，你会发现其中一个裸体男人的屁股上印着一些音乐（很有帮助的是，他的一个朋友指着它，好像在说，“伙计，你的屁股上印着一些音乐”）。

In 2014, a student at Oklahoma Christian University named Amelia Hamrick noticed the butt music and decided to transcribe it, record it, and post it to her blog, catapulting her to instant worldwide fame.

2014 年，俄克拉荷马基督教大学一位名叫阿米莉亚·哈姆里克 (Amelia Hamrick) 的学生注意到了屁股音乐，并决定将其转录、录制，并将其发布到她的博客上，使她立即享誉全球。

When I started writing this section, I intended to include this fact as a fun little Easter egg—look how thick this painting is, that it goes to the trouble of writing an actual song on a guy’s hiney!

But it turns out I got this all wrong, and the painting was even thicker than I thought.

但事实证明我全错了，这幅画比我想象的还要厚。

While researching the story, I stumbled upon three magisterial blog posts by Ian Pittman, an expert on medieval music.

在研究这个故事时，我偶然发现了中世纪音乐专家伊恩·皮特曼 (Ian Pittman) 发表的三篇权威博客文章。

He argues:

他认为：

Hamrick was not the first to resurrect the butt music.

哈姆里克并不是第一个复兴屁股音乐的人。

It was also done by the Swedish group Vox Vulgaris in 2003 , Atrium Musicae in 1978 (from the LP Codex Gluteo ), and, according to a now-deleted angry comment, by some art history professors in 1981 and 1961, whose erasure from this story has left them quite, if you will, butthurt.

The butt music is not music at all.

屁股音乐根本不是音乐。

It lacks a clef, the notes are spaced out randomly, and one of the staffs has a different number of lines.

它没有谱号，音符的间隔是随机的，并且其中一根五线谱的行数不同。

If you try to turn it into a coherent song, you’re basically making things up—or as we would call it if an LLM did it, hallucinating .

如果你试图把它变成一首连贯的歌曲，你基本上就是在编造东西——或者如果一个法学硕士这么做了，我们会称之为“幻觉”。

(Perhaps this is why every rendition of the butt music has sounded so different.)

（也许这就是为什么屁股音乐的每一次演绎听起来都如此不同。）

Bosch intended the butt music to be unplayable.

博斯希望屁股音乐无法播放。

If you look across his works, understand the context of his life, and spend a little extra time inspecting The Garden of Earthly Delights , you realize that Bosch thought secular music was a one-way ticket to hell.

(Church music was a-ok, as long as it was for the glory of god and not the glory of the players.) That’s why he depicted so many musicians being tortured: one of them is trapped inside a drum that’s being beaten by some kind of raccoon demon, another is being crucified on a harp, and the butt music guy himself is being crushed by a giant lute.

For Bosch, putting actual music on a guy’s ass would be like the FBI handing out copies of the Anarchist Cookbook .

对于博斯来说，把真正的音乐放在一个人的屁股上就像联邦调查局分发无政府主义食谱一样。

So the butt music is not a secret, but a warning: “If you play music outside of a church context, demons will torture you for eternity.” I find this funny, because I grew up amidst a moral panic over rap music; just imagine growing up in a moral panic over all music.

所以屁股音乐不是秘密，而是一个警告：“如果你在教堂之外演奏音乐，恶魔会永远折磨你。”我觉得这很有趣，因为我是在说唱音乐的道德恐慌中长大的；想象一下，在对所有音乐的道德恐慌中长大。

“Oh, your heart will go on, Celine Dion?

“哦，你的心会继续下去吗，席琳·迪翁？

No, your heart will be torn from your chest and fed to the slavering servants of Beelzebub.”

不，你的心会从胸口被撕下来，喂给别西卜流着口水的仆人。”

So that’s what thickness looks like, but what is it?

这就是厚度的样子，但它是什么呢？

What makes something thick?

是什么让东西变厚？

There is no straightforward answer to this question, which is what makes thickness both rare and remarkable in the first place.

这个问题没有直接的答案，这首先就是厚度变得稀有且非凡的原因。

But I think there are four thickening agents worth considering:

但我认为有四种增稠剂值得考虑：

Thick art bears the marks of approaches attempted and discarded, a pile of scraps larger than the finished project.

厚重的艺术作品带有尝试和丢弃的痕迹，一堆比完成的项目还大的碎片。

For example, here are four versions of the same idea from the artist Hokusai, one produced when he was 33, another when he was 44, another at 46, and another when he was 72, which is the one you’ll recognize.

The Betty Crocker Corporation could put just egg powder into their cake mix, but they don’t, because cracking an egg into a bowl allows people to pretend that they’re baking .

When you present your grandma with a birthday cake, you want to feel like “I made this for you, O Beloved Grandmama” and not like “I dumped a bag of dust into a bowl and heated it up so open wide you old biddy.”

Thick art is like that: it gives you an egg to crack.

厚重的艺术就是这样：它给你一个可以打破的鸡蛋。

It leaves space for some essential ingredient you bring yourself, so that the real action happens in your mind, rather than on the page or the canvas or the screen.

它为您自己带来的一些基本要素留出了空间，以便真正的行动发生在您的脑海中，而不是在页面、画布或屏幕上。

This effect is often too subtle to demonstrate in a single bullet point, but here’s an accessible example.

这种效果通常过于微妙，无法用单个要点来演示，但这里有一个易于理解的示例。

The 11th Hour by Graeme Base reads like a normal children’s book at first—oh look here are some beautiful pictures of animals, look at them playing board games, how nice, etc.

Only at the end of the story do you realize that a crime has been taking place under your nose the whole time, and that the clues are hidden in the details of the pictures you’ve just been paging through.

The real experience of the book is re -reading the book with this in mind.

读这本书的真正体验是带着这个想法重新阅读这本书。

Why this word, this scene, this character, and not some other one?

为什么是这个词、这个场景、这个角色，而不是其他的？

Thin art has no answers; thick art does.

薄弱的艺术没有答案；厚重的艺术确实如此。

Sometimes these reasons are known to the artist, and sometimes they are not, much to the delight and employment of Freudians everywhere.

有时艺术家知道这些原因，有时则不知道，这让世界各地的弗洛伊德主义者非常高兴和使用。

For example, did you know there’s lots of ears in Hamlet?

例如，你知道《哈姆雷特》中有很多耳朵吗？

There’s the poison-in-the-ear thing, of course, and characters are always eavesdropping on each other and exhorting each other to listen, but there’s also a lot of talk about ears (“in the porches of my ears”) and number of odd ear-based metaphors (“the whole ear of Denmark”, “like a mildewed ear”).

当然，还有耳朵里有毒的东西，角色总是互相窃听并劝告对方倾听，但也有很多关于耳朵的讨论（“在我耳朵的门廊里”）和一些奇怪的基于耳朵的隐喻（“丹麦的整个耳朵”，“就像发霉的耳朵”）。

Whether Shakespeare did this on purpose because he had some kind of ear fetish, whether the muse whispered it to him in his sleep (and through what orifice?), and whether any reader notices it—these are all beside the point.

The recurrence of these themes and images creates a depth that can be felt even if it isn’t known, and endlessly explored if it is.

这些主题和图像的反复出现创造了一种即使不为人所知也能感受到的深度，如果知道的话也能被无尽地探索。

Humans are mortal, for now.

就目前而言，人类是会死的。

This means all of our actions incur opportunity costs, and so the greater the cost paid to create a work of art, the thicker it can get.

这意味着我们所有的行为都会产生机会成本，因此创造一件艺术品所付出的成本越大，它就会变得越厚。

There’s no guarantee this will happen, of course, and that risk is part of the thrill.

当然，并不能保证这会发生，而风险也是刺激的一部分。

The Met Cloisters has these wooden altarpieces from the 1400s that draw your attention immediately, I think because the mind can subconsciously calculate the time it must have taken to carve them, and it sends a signal back to the eyes: important .

大都会修道院有这些 1400 年代的木制祭坛画，它们会立即引起您的注意，我想是因为大脑可以下意识地计算出雕刻它们所需的时间，并向眼睛发送一个信号：重要。

You know that you are not just seeing a work of art, but the expenditure of a life.

你知道，你看到的不仅仅是一件艺术品，而是一生的花费。

Here’s an even more haunting example.

这是一个更令人难忘的例子。

I once saw the magician duo Penn and Teller perform live, and at the end of the show, Penn told us he was going to swallow fire.

我曾经看过魔术师组合Penn和Teller的现场表演，在表演结束时，Penn告诉我们他要吞火。

As he dipped the torch in gasoline, he explained that what he was about to show us is not a trick.

当他将火炬浸入汽油中时，他解释说他要向我们展示的并不是一个把戏。

Magicians are always saying things like that, but in this case it’s true: there is no sleight of hand the protects the fire-eater from the flames.

魔术师总是这么说，但在这种情况下这是真的：没有什么花招可以保护食火者免受火焰的侵害。

They get blisters and burns, the fuel drips down their esophagus and poisons them, they suck the hydrocarbons into their lungs and contract “ fire-eater’s pneumonia ”.

To watch someone eat fire is to watch someone shorten their lifespan for your entertainment.

看着别人吃火，就是看着别人为了你的娱乐而缩短自己的寿命。

“When you leave the theater tonight, you’re going to ask yourselves, ‘How did they do it?’”, Penn said as he lit the torch.

“当你今晚离开剧院时，你会问自己，‘他们是怎么做到的？’”佩恩点燃火炬时说道。

“Instead, I’d like you to ask yourselves, ‘ Why did they do it?’“ And then he reared his head back and swallowed the flame.

“相反，我希望你们扪心自问，‘他们为什么这么做？’”然后他抬起头，吞下了火焰。

The other way to understand thickness is to study its absence.

了解厚度的另一种方法是研究它的缺失。

Guys who work in bike shops like to joke about bicycle-shaped objects —sure, that mass-produced hunk of metal and plastic has a seat, pedals, wheels, and handlebars, but that doesn’t mean it’s a bike .

在自行车商店工作的人喜欢拿自行车形状的物体开玩笑——当然，大量生产的金属和塑料大块有座位、踏板、车轮和车把，但这并不意味着它是自行车。

When the materials are so cheap and the construction is so slapdash, it deserves another name entirely.

当材料如此廉价而建筑如此草率时，它完全值得另一个名字。

This terminology comes in handy, because it turns out there are also movie-shaped objects and book-shaped objects, art-shaped objects and thought-shaped objects.

这个术语派上用场，因为事实证明，还有电影形物体和书形物体、艺术形物体和思想形物体。

Just because a series of pictures flickered across the screen and the credits followed, that doesn’t mean it was a movie .

仅仅因为屏幕上闪烁着一系列图片和随之而来的片尾字幕，并不意味着它是一部电影。

Just because it’s printed out and bound in cardboard, that doesn’t mean it’s a book .

仅仅因为它是打印出来并用纸板装订的，并不意味着它是一本书。

There is an additional essence that is necessary to turn something from the shape of a thing into the actual thing, and the difference between having and lacking that essence is the difference between a corpse and a person.

This essence is what makes fiction worth reading in the first place, but it’s hard to capture in a paragraph, so let me show you some nonfiction instead, where you can spot the thinness in an instant.

这种精髓正是小说首先值得一读的原因，但很难用一段文字来概括，所以让我给你看一些非小说类作品，你可以立即发现其中的薄弱之处。

Here’s a passage from a self-help book that a friend sent me recently:

这是朋友最近发给我的一本自助书中的一段话：

You are built to perform under pressure and that is exactly what you will do.

你生来就能在压力下表现出色，而这正是你将要做的。

Reminding yourself of this changes the meaning of those signs of stress that might otherwise be seen as “symptoms” of a problem.

提醒自己这一点会改变那些可能被视为问题“症状”的压力迹象的含义。

In fact, research shows that simply reminding someone that their performance improves under pressure improves their actual performance by 33 percent (Jamieson et al., 2018).

事实上，研究表明，仅仅提醒某人他们在压力下的表现有所提高，就能将他们的实际表现提高 33%（Jamieson 等，2018）。

These sentences crumble immediately upon inspection.

这些句子一经检查就会立即崩溃。

First of all, there’s something embarrassing and grating about getting generic encouragement from a book—you don’t know me!

首先，从书本中获得笼统的鼓励是一件令人尴尬和恼火的事情——你不了解我！

Maybe I am not “built to perform under pressure”!

也许我不是“适合在压力下表现的人”！

I might be a pathetic weakling who is destined to choke at the pivotal moment.

我可能是一个可怜的弱者，注定会在关键时刻窒息。

What then?

然后呢？

Plus, the facts here are brittle.

另外，这里的事实是脆弱的。

I looked up the paper in question and could not find this “33 percent” number anywhere.

我查阅了相关论文，但在任何地方都找不到这个“33%”的数字。

Maybe it’s made up?

也许是编出来的？

And what is “performance”, anyway?

到底什么是“性能”？

Performance on anything ?

任何方面的表现？

Surely not; the studies cited in the paper are mainly about taking multiple-choice tests.

当然不是；论文中引用的研究主要是关于多项选择测试的。

3 This is exactly the kind of finding that rises to prominence thanks to one small and flawed experiment, attracts a bunch of excited research, gets wildly overgeneralized under the handwavy phrase “studies show”, and then shrivels under a wave of debunkings and non-replications, such that after years of work, the whole thing ends with an embarrassed shrug .

3 这正是这样一种发现，由于一个小而有缺陷的实验而引人注目，吸引了一堆兴奋的研究，在“研究表明”的手写短语下被过度概括，然后在揭穿和非重复的浪潮中枯萎，以至于经过多年的工作，整个事情以尴尬的耸肩结束。

(Unsurprisingly, there is some evidence of publication bias for this “built to perform under pressure” effect.)

（毫不奇怪，有一些证据表明这种“为在压力下表现而生”的效果存在出版偏见。）

Reading a book like this feels like wandering through a Potemkin village.

读这样的书感觉就像漫步在波将金村。

Touch any of the ideas, and they tip over.

触及任何一个想法，它们就会翻倒。

In nonfiction, it might seem like the solution for puffery is pedantry, as if thickness comes from presenting every relevant fact in agonizing detail.

在非小说类作品中，解决虚张声势的办法似乎是迂腐，好像厚度来自于以令人痛苦的细节呈现每一个相关事实。

But it doesn’t, just as thickness in fiction doesn’t come from describing every object in the room before you let the characters open their mouths.

但事实并非如此，就像小说的厚度并不是来自于在让角色张开嘴之前描述房间里的每一件物品一样。

Instead, thickness comes from surfacing a few facts well, and in such a way that you realize the existence of entire universes of additional facts that could be known.

相反，厚度来自于很好地呈现一些事实，并以这样的方式让你认识到可以知道的额外事实的整个宇宙的存在。

For example, here’s a short passage from Jane Jacobs’ The Death and Life of Great American Cities :

例如，这是简·雅各布斯的《美国大城市的死与生》中的一小段：

[City planners] operate on the premise that city people seek the sight of emptiness, obvious order and quiet.

[城市规划者]运作的前提是城市人寻求空旷、明显的秩序和安静的景象。

Nothing could be less true.

没有什么比这更真实的了。

People’s love of watching activity and other people is constantly evident in cities everywhere.

在世界各地的城市中，人们对观看活动和他人的热爱始终显而易见。

This trait reaches an almost ludicrous extreme on upper Broadway in New York, where [...] benches have been placed behind big concrete buffers and on any day when the weather is even barely tolerable these benches are filled with people at block after block after block, watching the pedestrians who cross the mall in front of them, watching the traffic, watching the people on the busy sidewalks, watching each other.

这种特征在纽约上百老汇达到了近乎荒唐的极端，那里的长凳被放置在巨大的混凝土缓冲区后面，在任何一天，即使天气勉强可以忍受，这些长凳上也挤满了人，一个又一个街区，看着前面穿过购物中心的行人，看着交通，看着繁忙人行道上的人们，互相看着。

Jacobs notes that further north, near Columbia University, the streets are quieter, the pedestrians are more orderly, the traffic is calmer...and the benches are empty.

雅各布斯指出，再往北，靠近哥伦比亚大学，街道更安静，行人更有秩序，交通更平静……而且长凳是空的。

“I have tried them and can see why,” Jacobs says.

“我已经尝试过了，并且明白为什么，”雅各布斯说。

“No place could be more boring.” 4

“没有比这更无聊的地方了。” 4

There are a lot of threads here, so I’ll pick just one.

这里有很多主题，所以我只选择一个。

Jacobs is pointing out a fact that millions of people observe every day, but almost none of them notice.

雅各布斯指出了一个数百万人每天都会观察到的事实，但几乎没有人注意到。

Including me!

包括我！

I once lived on those boring blocks that Jacobs describes, and although I noticed something amiss—I would tell friends I lived in “the dead zone of Manhattan”—I never understood why.

我曾经住在雅各布斯描述的那些无聊的街区，尽管我注意到有些不对劲——我会告诉朋友我住在“曼哈顿的死区”——但我从来不明白为什么。

Nor do I think psychologists really have an answer for what motivates people to sit on benches and watch other humans go by.

我也不认为心理学家真正能解答人们坐在长凳上观看其他人经过的动机。

What drive is this satisfying ?

这是什么驱动力？

There is a danger, of course, in seeking and praising thickness, one that even I understood when I was a barely-sentient teenager.

当然，追求和赞扬厚度是有危险的，即使我在还是个几乎没有知觉的青少年时也明白这一点。

If you allow for the existence of secret treasures that can only be accessed with effort and analysis, then you empower the elitists and the snobs.

如果你允许只有通过努力和分析才能获得的秘密宝藏的存在，那么你就为精英主义者和势利小人提供了权力。

“Buddy, don’t even talk to me until you’ve been in the cave!”

“伙计，你进山洞之前别跟我说话！”

But look around.

The snobs are in full retreat .

势利小人正在全面撤退。

We have swung the pendulum so far toward poptimism, toward the blinkered idea that all art is equal because all humans are equal, toward the ethos that guilty pleasures are simply pleasures, that I’m not sure if we can ever swing it back.

到目前为止，我们已经把钟摆转向了乐观主义，转向了所有艺术都是平等的，因为所有人类都是平等的狭隘观念，转向了罪恶感快乐只是快乐的精神，我不确定我们是否能把它摆回来。

Erasing the line between the thick and the thin has left us defenseless against slop at the exact moment of its onslaught.

抹掉浓与淡之间的界限，让我们在污水袭击的那一刻毫无防御能力。

Everyone can sense there’s something amiss with the prose that comes out of the machines, but we lack the language to talk about it, and so we’ve converged on the idea that slop simply means using too many em dashes, bullet points, and line breaks.

每个人都能感觉到机器输出的散文有问题，但我们缺乏谈论它的语言，所以我们一致认为，“过分”仅仅意味着使用了太多的破折号、项目符号和换行符。

No, what separates substance from slop is thickness.

不，物质与废液的区别在于厚度。

Slop holds no secrets; it signifies nothing.

Under scrutiny, it evaporates.

在审视之下，它就蒸发了。

All it can offer is bottomlessness—sure, there’s nothing on, but at least there are infinite channels!

它所能提供的只是无底洞——当然，什么也没有，但至少有无限的通道！

That’s why I’m neither surprised nor dismayed when studies find that people prefer AI art to human art.

这就是为什么当研究发现人们更喜欢人工智能艺术而不是人类艺术时，我既不感到惊讶也不沮丧。

Of course they do!

他们当然知道！

In the short term, thinness prevails.

短期来看，瘦身为主。

When people are making snap judgments, they want pretty flowers, poems that rhyme, pleasing pablum, the simulacrum of thought.

当人们做出快速判断时，他们想要美丽的花朵、押韵的诗歌、令人愉悦的食物、思想的拟像。

5 But none of these last.

5 但这些都不会持久。

The real question is not “which of these things looks nicer when you look at them for two seconds?” but “which of these things will stand the test of time?” Which of them will people fly across the world to see?

真正的问题不是“当你看两秒钟时，这些东西中哪一个看起来更好？”但“这些东西中哪一个能经受住时间的考验呢？”人们会飞越世界去看其中的哪一个？

Which of them will drive people so mad they’ll major in the humanities ?

其中哪一个会让人们如此疯狂地选择主修人文学科？

This kind of quality can only be proven by longevity.

这种品质只能通过长寿来证明。

Which answers another question I had when I was scowling in the back of English class: why do we have to spend so much time reading old stuff?

这回答了我在英语课后面愁眉苦脸时提出的另一个问题：为什么我们要花这么多时间阅读旧东西？

And the answer is: this is the only stuff that we can be sure is any good.

答案是：这是我们唯一可以确定是好的东西。

Great works of art, like successful genes, convince humans to keep passing them on.

伟大的艺术作品就像成功的基因一样，说服人类不断传承下去。

If something has survived for centuries, then there’s probably something to it.

如果某样东西已经存在了几个世纪，那么它可能有其存在的意义。

We’re not still brewing Bronze Age beer and we’re not still sailing Bronze Age ships, but we are still telling Bronze Age stories, and this warrants our attention.

我们不再酿造青铜时代的啤酒，我们不再航行青铜时代的船只，但我们仍在讲述青铜时代的故事，这值得我们关注。

Speaking of longevity, remember a few months ago, when everyone was Studio Ghibli-fying all the pictures in their camera roll?

说到长寿，还记得几个月前，当时每个人都在吉卜力工作室翻录相机胶卷中的所有照片吗？

Well, why did they stop?

Why are those millions of images gathering dust in a data center while people continue to watch actual Studio Ghibli films?

为什么数以百万计的图像在数据中心积满灰尘，而人们却继续观看吉卜力工作室的真实电影？

Why is it that Suno can AI-generate you any kind of music you want, but if you go on the Suno Reddit, you’ll find a running joke that no one can stand anyone’s Suno music but their own—a quality that, I can’t help but mention, also applies to farts?

为什么 Suno 可以人工智能为你生成任何你想要的音乐，但如果你去 Suno Reddit，你会发现一个流行的笑话，除了他们自己的音乐之外，没有人能忍受任何人的 Suno 音乐——我忍不住要提一下，这种品质也适用于放屁？

The slop-acalypse that so many of us fear, when people will stop looking at anything made by humans and only look at things made by machines—why hasn’t that happened yet?

当人们不再关注人类制造的任何东西而只关注机器制造的东西时，我们很多人都担心会发生灾难——为什么这种情况还没有发生呢？

Do the models need another million tokens?

这些模型还需要一百万代币吗？

Are we still looking for the right prompts?

我们还在寻找正确的提示吗？

Or could it be that we are attempting to mass-produce something that cannot be mass-produced?

或者我们是否正在尝试批量生产一些无法批量生产的东西？

Regardless, people keep trying.

不管怎样，人们一直在努力。

About once a week, I get a pitch from some AI startup that wants to automate some part of my writing.

大约每周一次，我都会收到一些人工智能初创公司的推介，他们希望将我的部分写作自动化。

The most recent one says it’s “built for credible thinkers who have a book’s worth of ideas but not the time it typically takes to write one”.

最近的一篇文章称，它“是为那些拥有一本书价值的想法但没有通常写一本书所需时间的可信思想家而构建的”。

I’m sorry, but if you’re building or using a tool like this, then you’ve got slop for brains.

抱歉，如果你正在构建或使用这样的工具，那么你的大脑就太笨了。

There is no such thing as having a “book’s worth of ideas” that are all ready to go except for the small matter of choosing the right words and putting them in the right order.

除了选择正确的词语并按正确的顺序排列这些小问题之外，不存在所谓“一本书的思想价值”都已准备就绪的事情。

I know exactly the feeling that these slop-trepeneurs are preying on, because I feel it all the time: I’ve got these thoughts in my head, and boy oh boy they’re good ones, all-timers, really, and it’s so annoying that I have to spend all this time making the words sound good, when the ideas behind the words are already so good!

我确切地知道这些垃圾企业家正在捕食的感觉，因为我一直感觉到：我脑子里有这些想法，天哪，天哪，他们都是好人，真的，而且这太烦人了，我必须花所有的时间让这些话听起来好听，而这些话背后的想法已经很好了！

But this is an illusion.

但这是一种幻觉。

The ideas are not already good.

这些想法还不是很好。

They need to be thickened.

它们需要加厚。

I understand why it’s tempting to force a machine do the hard part for you, but it can’t, and the hard part is the only part worth doing anyway.

我理解为什么强迫机器为你完成困难的部分是很诱人的，但它不能，而且困难的部分是唯一值得做的部分。

Making something thick—that’s a lot of pressure!

制作厚的东西——压力很大！

But remember: you were built to perform under pressure, and that’s just what you’ll do.

但请记住：你生来就是为了在压力下表现出色，而这正是你要做的。

Experimental History would trade its life for your entertainment

实验历史会用生命换取你的娱乐

These images come from this article , which was referenced in this tweet , which was picked up in this post , which is where I found it.

这些图像来自这篇文章，这篇推文中引用了这篇文章，这篇文章是我在这篇文章中找到的。

I first learned of this example from Nabeel S.

我第一次从 Nabeel S 那里得知这个例子。

Qureshi ’s What Makes Art Great?

库雷希的《是什么让艺术变得伟大？》

, which is another good take on this topic.

，这是关于这个主题的另一个很好的看法。

Also, those studies did not remind participants “that their performance improves under pressure”—they told participants that feeling anxious during a test doesn’t mean you will necessarily perform worse, and it might make you perform better.

此外，这些研究并没有提醒参与者“他们的表现在压力下会有所提高”——他们告诉参与者，在测试过程中感到焦虑并不意味着你一定会表现得更差，而且可能会让你表现得更好。

For another take on this, see Max Read ’s “ People prefer A.I.

关于这一点的另一种看法，请参阅 Max Read 的“人们更喜欢人工智能”。

art because people prefer bad art ”.

艺术，因为人们更喜欢糟糕的艺术”。

One of my high school English teachers got this point across to us in such an effective way!

我的一位高中英语老师以如此有效的方式向我们传达了这一点！

All year we read 'great' books, discussed, analyzed, wrote essays, etc. Then with about a month left, we read a thriller that was on the best seller lists at the time, had been for months.

一整年我们都在阅读“伟大”的书籍，进行讨论、分析、写论文等等。然后在剩下大约一个月的时间里，我们读了一本当时畅销书排行榜上的惊悚小说，已经好几个月了。

The teacher presented it as both an opportunity to read something we (the students) would be more likely to approach with enthusiasm, and to apply our new analytic abilities to something more recent.

老师把它当作一个机会来阅读我们（学生）更可能热情地接触的东西，并将我们新的分析能力应用到最近的东西上。

As you can imagine, we all started out with happy anticipation.

正如你可以想象的那样，我们都带着愉快的期待开始了。

Deflated so quickly.

瘪得这么快。

It was, of course, dreck.

当然，这很糟糕。

We came to class and said so.

我们来上课也是这么说的。

The teacher had us tell him WHY it was dreck, what was different from the (highly varied) books we'd been reading the rest of the year, what made it so ...

老师让我们告诉他为什么这本书很糟糕，与我们今年剩下的时间读的（种类繁多的）书籍有什么不同，是什么让它如此......

disappointing.

令人失望。

We analyzed that dreck as hard as we had the 'classics'.

我们像分析“经典”一样认真地分析了这个烂摊子。

And on that note, a couple of years ago I finally read 'Middlemarch'.

就这一点而言，几年前我终于读到了《米德尔马契》。

OMG!

我的天啊！

Why did I wait so long!

为什么我等了这么久！

I've already re-read it once.

我已经重新读过一遍了。

"But this is an illusion.

“但这只是一种幻觉。

The ideas are not already good.

这些想法还不是很好。

They need to be thickened."

它们需要加厚。”

In my own experience of art-making (fiction and music), the initiating ideas in and of themselves are not only insufficient until I've done the work of constructing and communicating them, but they aren't even really all that clearly "mine." The best things I've made started with ideas that just sort of popped into my mind while I was falling asleep or something like that.

根据我自己的艺术创作（小说和音乐）经验，在我完成构建和传达它们的工作之前，最初的想法本身不仅是不够的，而且它们甚至不是真正完全“我的”。我所做的最好的事情都是从我睡着或类似的时候突然出现在我脑海中的想法开始的。

The whole process of execution is the part that I really have organized conscious agency over.

整个执行过程是我真正组织有意识的能动性的部分。

That process is where I figure out how to make it compelling and rewarding for others, but it's also where I figure out for myself just what the "idea" really is.

在这个过程中，我弄清楚了如何使其具有吸引力并对其他人有所回报，但也是我自己弄清楚“想法”到底是什么的地方。

It's a remarkable process, simultaneously self-discovering and connective.

这是一个非凡的过程，同时是自我发现和联系的过程。

Basically every other creative person I know feels the same way.

基本上我认识的所有其他有创造力的人都有同样的感觉。

The pitch that we could outsource that part of the work is simply not tempting at all.

我们可以外包这部分工作的说法根本没有诱惑力。

中文为机器翻译，仅供参考。