It's okay to like vinyl

Here's a nice if somewhat over-lengthy piece about why people prefer antiquated technologies like vinyl records instead of digital media. The main point seems to be quite simple :

Work, effort, meaning – these ideas are all interconnected for users and consumers of analogue technology. Whereas work is often seen as a means to an end, from earning a living to exercising, "analoguers" get a buzz out of the processes of setting things up, getting things right, trial and error, and building up skills. This "love of the process" was backed up by another photographer, Dan, during a Zoom discussion held amid one of the Covid lockdowns :

"When I'm serious, I don't want to get distracted by what [image] I'm going to end up with. Even with instant photography, I know I'm going to see the shot soon – just not now. I love everything up until pressing the shutter. I love searching for the frame, I like the output, but the whole process is important."

This makes a lot of sense to me, and also echoes both Chris Hatfield and Tim Peake's books in which they say that as an astronaut, you have to enjoy the training. You can't make it all about the big payoff of going to space because that might never happen, and is only a very small part of the end result. As for vinyl records, I think enjoying them because they offer a "richer sound" is frankly silly, but if you actually prefer the slightly slower process of retrieving a disc, putting the needle on the record and pressing a big chunky mechanical button... I'm not going to stop you. In fact I completely sympathise with the need for tactile sensation even in this very limited case. Physical contact gives a feeling of realness you'll never get from playing a digital file. It's the difference between porn and sex, I suppose...

Ahem. Anyway it's got sod-all to do with the sound quality, so just stop pretending that it does. I'm more inclined to the argument that actually it's the poorer sound quality that has value here :

"Half of what you do trying to make music is like a happy accident that ends up sounding better than what you intended. If the machine doesn't do exactly what you thought it was going to do, or goes a bit out of tune, it is all part of the process. You get a little bit of randomness in it, and that randomness can add to what you are trying to achieve."

Similarly, many of Mick Rock's legendary music photographs are technically very grainy because he was shooting in low light and "pushing" the film to its limits, but as a result, they have a painterly feel that has enhanced their appeal and power.

In a sense, while analogue users feel they have greater control over their creativity, this occurs through surrendering to the demands of one's device – along the lines of German electronic legends Kraftwerk's menschmaschine (Man-Machine) philosophy. This runs contrary to the promise of most consumer-driven innovation: functional superiority and increased ease of use.

Again this makes a lot of sense to me. Having to deal with limitations and errors forces you to think a little bit, to really get creative : if you have absolute control then it all becomes a bit overwhelming, whereas if things are more restricted, perhaps it's a bit easier to accept these limitations which are not of your own making. And I suggest that people want these authentic imperfections. Sure, you could recreate it all with digital, but this wouldn't be the same as a genuine accident. We like feeling that we're not totally in control of the process.

The process of slowing it all down also adds value. As a follow-up to a post on my ReMarkable, I really like this tablet. It's just as indispensable six months later as it was on day one. Having to slow down a bit to write, with it more difficult (but not impossible) to undo, forces me to think more carefully. It also helps keep things a bit shorter. And of course, it's got that vital tactile sensation that's quite different, though not necessarily better, than a boring old clunky keyboard* (I do still enjoy also typing on a keyboard). Analogue writing has a different, more deliberate flavour to it than typing. All that being true :

* It's also really useful as a storage device for the long interesting pieces I find and don't want to forget.

Yet none of the people we've interviewed are analogue purists. These vinyl lovers mostly also have Spotify lists; film photographers will sometimes take out their phone to capture material quickly; and modular synth fans often have tablets full of apps to replicate sounds on the go.

Well, sometimes the process matters and sometimes it doesn't. As in the solarigraphy conference I attended/co-organised last year : sometimes people take photographs as a means of self-expression but not for the sake of art. I take photos even of famous landmarks because I want to remember things as I saw it, what the weather was like, were their crowds of tourists or was it empty, under construction, etc. I want to capture my experience, not necessarily evoke any emotions. It matters to me because it's mine.

I suggest we all sometimes want to either enjoy the process or the result, and we value both differently at different times. Sometimes we want to actually create things and enjoy the process, and that act of self-expression by doing things the hard way has value. But sometimes we just want the end result, and that's perfectly fine too. AI tools are in that sense a democratisation of creativity, taking the hard work out of our hands : if you want to see a pug on the Moon and just think that would be amusing in itself, and don't want to attend a six-month painting course to get good enough to produce the end result... that's fine ! If you want to read a silly story about said pug fighting Moon monsters, and don't want it hand-crafted but just value the output, that's fine too. And of course if you want to do it the hard way, nobody should have a problem with that either.

This has consequences everywhere. At work I'm currently in the process of preparing a couple of papers on visual source extraction. A great many people don't want to have to do this, and I quite understand that. Finding every galaxy in a large data set is inevitably a slow and sometimes tedious process regardless of how good the inspection tools are. But for me it's the main enjoyable part of the whole procedure. I like having to carefully sift through the data, clicking when I see a source, adjusting the region used for measurements, comparing this rawest of data with optical images... it's a relaxing and therapeutic process, up to a point. It enriches the whole experience, gives it meaning, and is anyway provably better than most automatic techniques. But I don't mind at all that other people prefer to avoid this and would rather focus their energies on understanding the final catalogues – I only object to anyone saying that visual source extraction isn't a good idea, because it demonstrably is.

Well, there we are. From astronauts to vinyl-loving pretentious hipsters, to astronomers hunting galaxies and doing calculations with circular slide rules, humans love touching things and literally feeling a connection to what they're doing. We value the process and we value the output. And it's all fine... it just won't stop me making fun of vinyl-loving hipsters. Thank goodness cassette tapes don't seem to be making a comeback though, because that would be a different conversation.

Philosophers be like, "?"

In the Science of Discworld books the authors postulate Homo Sapiens is actually Pan Narrans, the storytelling ape. Telling stories is, they suggest, a fundamental way in which we think. Similarly in Hogfather, in which there's a finite quantity of belief in the universe : stop believing in something and you have to belief in something else instead. It's not that you have any choice about it. You just will, because that's how human beings work. 

I suppose it's Nietzsche++, in a way... God is dead, and we have killed him, and that's why we're believing in Jewish space lasers and all the other increasingly boring conspiracy theories.

But I digress. No doubt there's much to be said about the conservation of belief but I leave that for another time. Instead, here's a nice Aeon piece about the nature of philosophy which examines the role of storytelling in philosophy. Is it art ? Is it science ? Is it something else ?

Early proponents of the ‘analytic’ method in philosophy such as Bertrand Russell saw good philosophy as science-like and were dismissive of philosophy that was overly poetic or unscientific. Russell, for example, took issue with the French philosopher Henri Bergson, who was something of a bête-noire for early analytic philosophers. Bergson’s theorising (Russell thought) did not depend on argument but rather on expressing ‘truths’, so-called, arrived at by introspection.

For Macdonald, philosophical theories are very much like ‘pictures’ or ‘stories’ and, perhaps even more controversially, she suggests that philosophical debates often come down to ‘temperamental differences’. For example, whether you are willing to believe (in accordance with thinkers like René Descartes) that we have an immaterial soul will come down to more than just the philosophical arguments you are presented with. Your view on this matter, Macdonald thinks, will more likely be determined by your own personal values, life experiences, religion and so on. In this way, she thinks, temperamental differences account for many philosophical disagreements.

Well, surely temperamental differences have to play a role in which theory you like best (see also this post). Science can make rational and objective judgements about the world, this is true. Facts are facts. Facts don't care about feelings, and of course feelings don't care about facts. Since you will never have all the facts, you're going to have to rely on irrational factors to determine which interpretation suits you best. Like the need to tell stories and believe in things, this isn't something we can directly control. We can mitigate it as much as possible (that's what science is for), but not to zero. That's impossible, in the strong sense of the word.

So this seems pretty solid so far : we can't help being ourselves. Of course this applies universally, but the specifics are where it gets interesting :

Macdonald subjects philosophical enquiry itself to scrutiny, analysing the sorts of ways that philosophers talk and write – especially in comparison with scientists. This kind of linguistic analysis is a way of taking a step back and taking a look at the practice of philosophy itself. It involves answering questions like: What do philosophical disagreements involve and what do philosophical theories look like ? What do philosophers mean when they talk about philosophical ‘theories’? And is it the same thing that scientists mean when they use the word ‘theory’? Macdonald’s answer is a categorical ‘No’.

This of course raises whether philosophical ideas can be tested. Macdonald says no, that philosophy only provides new interpretations, not new data : "Every philosophical theory of perception is compatible with all perceptual facts", she says, or as Aeon puts it, "philosophical theories, unlike scientific theories, are not in the business of discovering new facts."

Before I tackle whether I agree with this or not, in the finest Aeon tradition, the author immediately produces an analogy which seems to me to be deeply flawed. I don't know why they do this, but I suspect some contractual obligation in order to drive site engagement. At least, that's the best reason I can come up with.

Two opposing positions in the philosophy of perception are direct realism and indirect realism (I’m going to oversimplify both here). Direct realism is the view that we directly perceive external objects in the world around us. When I look out of my window, I directly see a tree – and the nature of my perceptual experience informs me (directly) about the nature of the tree. Indirect realism, on the other hand, is the view that I only ever indirectly perceive objects like trees. What I directly perceive are mental representations – i.e., ideas of trees – that are produced in my mind when my sense organs (eg, my eyes) are stimulated in the right way and send signals to my brain. 

Right. It seems to me that direct realism is self-evidently mad. When we see a tree, we don't experience the same thing as when we hear or touch a tree. That would be utterly bonkers. Of course, our sensory data must correspond with something external that induces the sensory data, because most of the time we don't see things that aren't there (i.e. perception from one sense can be validated with others). The alternative is idealism, that ideas about things are all there are, but that in my view is just as weird. 

So yeah, in this case I think some philosophical ideas can be tested, without calling them science. You don't need empirical measurements for any of this. You can contrive an interpretation from existing data and discard it because it's clearly wrong or incoherent. Or maybe you can't, in which case you need to find more data...

(I have of course waxed lyrical about this many times before, not least of which can be found here, so I won't dwell on this again. Either you believe what I'm saying is tickety-boo, or you probably think I'm a loony. It's fine either way !)

Both the direct realist and the indirect realist agree that, when I look out my window, I see a tree. What they disagree on is what it means to say that ‘I see a tree’ – they disagree on the mechanics of what is going on, or how best to explain the fact that I see a tree. Most importantly, for Macdonald, there’s no empirical test available to draw a line between the two theories. We can’t run an experiment to test for the truth of either theory because, on the level of experience, both parties agree that it’s true to say: ‘I see a tree.’

Okay, bad analogy aside, this seems to do a decent job of getting to the key issue. But, why can't it be both ? Why can't some philosophy issues be testable and others be purely interpretative ? Moral philosophy doesn't seem to me to be the same as philosophy of mind, yet alone philosophy of science, so why the need to pigeon-hole these disparate fields together ?

Macdonald claims that philosophy’s value is much closer to that of art, literature or poetry than science. She explains that the arts inform us that ‘Language has many uses besides that of giving factual information or drawing deductive conclusions.’ A philosophical theory may not provide ‘information in a scientific sense’, she writes, ‘but, as poetry shows, it is far from worthless.’

A good work of poetry, art or literature, Macdonald explains, can ‘enlarge’ certain aspects of human life to help us see and think about them differently. For example, Shakespeare’s Othello encourages us to think about jealousy by making it the centrepiece of the play. Or consider the emphasis on humanity’s relationship with nature in Romantic poetry. In both cases, the artist has ‘zoomed in’ on, or ‘enlarged’, an aspect of life – in a way that it is not typically enlarged in real life – to encourage the audience to reflect on it.

To re-use one of my favourite Guy Consolmagno quotes, "The importance of poetry is that it carries you into a place where ordinary words can no longer carry you." Art is not philosophy, and philosophy isn't art, but surely, like science, they are all forms of creative processes. They just operate with different (but not always mutually exclusive) intentions and constraints. A scientist must be creative to interpret the data in new but testable ways, and cannot allow themselves to imagine the data is wrong just because they wish it was. A philosopher has fewer constraints, and the artist perhaps none at all : they express emotions and seek to invoke them in others for its own sake. They may or may not attempt to convince their audience of any wider point.

Art is probably the least constrained or defined field of human endeavour there is. It doesn't distinguish itself neatly from other fields because you can be self-expressive in science and engineering, though only to a degree. You can't really express much by assembling a catalogue or galaxies or measuring the length of a bacterium. But you do get a measure of self expression in how you choose to communicate this to others, which facts you think are pertinent to your interpretation and which the reader doesn't need to know, how you choose to visualise or express the data to convey the message you think is correct.

This may sound a little manipulative, even sinister, but it's not so. In true art emotion is selected consciously. In other fields – all other fields, to varying degrees – emotion plays a role, but only at the subconscious level. Science acknowledges that these factors are at work and actively tries to eliminate them, always probing issues from new directions to see if the established interpretation still holds up. It's not that scientists are actively trying to make their work into Ciceronian invective, far from it. But they do acknowledge that human biases are at work. The overlap with art in the deliberate sense of emotional self-expression comes at the front end, in presenting ideas to the audience once that idea has been established, not in formulating it to begin with. Scientists use creativity to solve problems and express their ideas, but they don't consciously decide to use a particular sort of barometer because it's a lovely shade of pink.

For Macdonald, the job of a moral philosopher is akin to that of an art critic: both are in the business of defending or justifying certain judgments or preferences. It’s not, as Russell says, as simple as liking one image more than another. There’s an onus on being able to justify or rationalise that preference.

I suppose that's fine (though I don't think I've ever encountered a critique that's changed my mind about any sort of work of art at all), but I would say : what need for categorisation ? It won't change how anyone does anything. It might be interesting to think about and perhaps useful as a rough guide, but that's about it. It's completely fine that there are overlaps between the fields. It's completely fine that scientists need to be philosophical in determining their own biases, and it's completely fine if some philosophical theories are quasi-scientific in their testability. And it's completely fine that art, science, philosophy and innumerable other fields all employ human creativity. None of this in any way invalidates anything whatsoever.

Which I suppose makes this post a complete waste of time. Oh well, my brain is fried from a seemingly endless of reports to write, and I physically needed to do something more expressive than suggesting which bit of the sky to look at next.

Positive effects from negative history

Most books I read tend to be text-heavy. I tend to like stuff which is analytical but lively, preferably chronological and focused on either a specific event, time, or place. I usually plump for depth over breadth, but sometimes I make exceptions. One was Towers of Defiance, a comprehensive look at the castles of the Welsh Princes. Another more interesting read, which I've just finished, is Philip Matyszak's Lost Cities of the Ancient World. 

You can read my short review-assessment here. In even briefer form, it's a wonderful hardback coffee-table compendium of an assortment of lost cities from classical antiquity, meaning Europe and its immediate surroundings from ~5,000 BC onwards. I was lured by the wonderful photographs and, to be honest, the thickness of the paper, which just made it feel so dang... high quality. As a souvenir-treat from my recent Berlin trip it's just a lovely thing to have.

But what I want to elaborate on here is not the factual content of the book (which is excellently presented – Matyszak writes in a much more readable style than the authors of most other compendiums) but a concept that it made me think about. In Terry Pratchett's Equal Rites, the protagonists develop a form of magic which revolves around not... doing any magic. That is, not summoning specific demons and not turning people into frogs. Matyszak explores something equivalent here : negative history.

Lost Cities is a fascinating look at cities which died. Some were destroyed, others suffered climate change or other natural disasters that rendered them uninhabitable. A few were out-competed by their neighbours, sometimes (in the case of what Matyszak calls a "vampire city") deliberately, much as though cities were agents in an ecosystem. Despite the title only a few were actually lost in the usual sense of being forgotten and then rediscovered; Matyszak generally means they were abandoned. A few don't really even fit this category, evolving into modern versions of their original selves which are at only slightly different locations.

But some were truly lost in the fullest sense of the world. A few remain so : we know that cities like Tigranocerta existed, we know roughly where, but the precise site has yet to be discovered. And even of those which were only abandoned, Matyszak seems to deliberately pick the ones which are largely forgotten by the modern public, eschewing obvious candidates like Pompeii and Herculaneum in favour of the nearby Stabiae. Some cities were great administrative capitals in their day, while others seem to have played no great role in any important historical events whatsoever. All were once thriving metropolises, but for a host of reasons they failed and faded.

This is truly negative history, the known unknowns : we know the gaps in our knowledge, can see the rough size and shape of them, but have little idea as to what to fill them with.

By drawing attention to these gaps directly, Matyszak reminds us just how incomplete our understanding is. Not only have vast amounts of written records succumbed to the ravages of time, but dozens upon dozens of cities have literally crumbled into dust. Whole cultures and lived experiences are now vanished. And all this reminds us that what we have left is so easily susceptible to misinterpretation. Just as in astronomical catalogues of poor completeness, without proper context things can look very different.

With a degree of mild frustration, many's the book I've read where a throwaway statement makes it clear that there whopping great fundamental gaps in what we know that, if filled, would surely transform how we think about historical events and peoples. Most of the time even the best of history books tend to gloss over this; look, I love everything Tom Holland writes, but he's the absolute master of creating a filled narrative. Matyszak instead opts to draw our attention to the gaps head-on. He doesn't explicitly point out the importance of doing this because he doesn't have to : once a gap is noticed, its importance becomes self-evident.

To be fair, sometimes other popular historians do do this as well. Marc Morris is particularly adept at making the unknown gaps almost something to celebrate by inflaming the reader's curiosity. Trow's Spartacus is another one which is commendable in emphasising how little source material it has to go on; he tries his best to look at what the Romans didn't say to recreate what probably happened. But overwhelmingly, historians (though not archaeologists) tend to prefer actual hard data, verifiable facts and records, rather than inferring things from non-statements and gaps.

Which is all quite understandable, of course. Still, I feel that Matyszak's offering is a welcome change (so much so that immediately on completion I ordered his other book : Forgotten Peoples). Exploring the gaps, even – or especially – if we have to speculate, reminds us of how little of what we have to rely on and how our interpretations might be subject to change. We often only have what one side would wish us to have, but history is written perhaps not so much by the victors as the survivors.

There are obvious parallels to science. In astronomy we're actually really keen on this, "knowing" that so much of the Universe is invisible and inexplicable : exploring the gaps is what we do. In popular history books this is no doubt difficult, and I suppose that professional historians are more like scientists than the storytellers one gets from the bookshop. Even so, perhaps this is something to consider for the popular history author. Trying to feel out the size and shapes of the gaps, inferring what might be inside them... surely this too is interesting for the lay reader ? It's a bit like if we were to have charted the whole boundary of the Pacific Ocean but not bothered to even speculate as to whether there were any islands or continents lurking inside it : except worse, because often in history it seems we know there are massive gaps in which something very important must have happened.

Similarly in philosophy, understanding the mindset of ancient peoples can benefit greatly by looking at what they don't say. At least, when we have good reason to expect them to. Again the parallels to astronomy, in which non-detections are genuinely very interesting but only if we expected to find something. A galaxy without any gas isn't especially interesting, but if it's in a group and all the rest are chock-full of hydrogen, well, that non-detection becomes a bit more exciting.

Take Plato's non-discussion of the morality of slavery. Naively, given his minute, word-by-word dissections of other issues, we might expect him to discuss this, so why didn't he ? Likewise, why didn't he come up with a more liberal (in the strong sense of the word) basis for his ideal societies ? The concept today that everyone should allowed to do as they wish except when that interferes with others seems simple enough.

To be fair to historians, Michael Scott made very interesting suggestions in this area, namely that society at the time was concerned far more with the collective than the individual, and that such a spirit of individualism (epitomised by Plato's mentor Socrates) would have seemed alien indeed. Socrates and Plato alike were not pseudo-fascists or pseudo-Communists, despite advocating certain policies that the more modern extremists on both sides would happily go along with. No, they were just more individualistic than many of their contemporaries. Individualism is sometimes a derided word, but it no more makes one a fascist than it makes one a liberal or a libertarian. All these concepts simply did not exist in ancient Athens. Without considering these vital negatives, one gets a limited and perverted view of history that warps too easily in moralising, entirely missing out on the changes in human thought that have evolved over the last two thousand years or more.

Anyway, rant over. My take-home message is very simple : sometimes, directly drawing attention to the gaps is important and you can't rely on readers doing it for themselves. A degree of speculation about what they might contain and how this would influence the facts you do know is extremely useful. It's not good to go nuts with this, but if you don't do it at all it's easy to fall into the trap of thinking that all the facts you have are all the facts there are.

And I'm currently reading the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, surely a classic example of the importance of negatives. The esteemed author apparently thought that recording the appointment of individual bishops and noting epidemics of bird flu was tremendously useful, but cared little for any details of battle tactics or political allegiances or, well, basically anything else. It's a rather fascinating but strange read, and I'm definitely looking forward to more Matyszak.