Many of the artists on the Art Basel run are nepo babies. Same with academic art, music, and architecture. It's incredibly hard to get into those circles without some kind of independent income and/or cultural networking.
Every so often the invisible hand picks someone off the streets, but it happens much less often than it might.
It's not a business. Selling art is a business. Making art isn't a business.
Many artists would rather blow up their careers than make work solely for business reasons.
There's a huge cadre of content creators and entertainers who are happy to do that, but - as the previous post says - their work is typically entirely forgettable. Even when it's commercially successful.
And successful original creators usually have business managers to deal with "basic economics."
The ideal for most artists is complete creative freedom and an open budget. Not many get there, and not everyone who does get there produces something memorable. But it happens occasionally, and it's usually far more interesting than create-to-market content.
> It's not a business. Selling art is a business. Making art isn't a business. Many artists would rather blow up their careers than make work solely for business reasons.
Again, you're arguing a distinction which the author agrees with. From the article:
> Most people who enjoy making art should not try to make it their full time job. When you turn an avocation (hobby) into a vocation (job) you have to do new things you do not enjoy.
I think perhaps you're getting hung up on some semantic quibble rather than focusing on the broader point. "Artist", "professional artist", "artist for a living", "someone who spends most of their hours making art but also needs to eat". Choose whichever term satisfies your complaint. These people need money to live, that's just how the world works.
Also, one major confounding factor is that in 2008, gig economy apps like Uber did not exist.
The unemployment rate is measured by if someone has done an hour of paid work in the last week. Which is pretty easy to disqualify for if you do any gig economy work. And in a true slowdown the gig apps will probably stop being able to absorb people.
Yes, but it doesn't even need mysticism or duality.
There's a more straightforward problem, which is that all of science is limited by our ability to generate and test mental models, and there's been no research into the accuracy and reliability of our modelling processes.
Everything gets filtered through human consciousness - math, experiment, all of it. And our definition of "objective" is literally just "we cross-check with other educated humans and the most reliable and consistent experience wins, for now."
How likely is it that human consciousness is the most perfect of all possible lenses, doesn't introduce distortions, and has no limits, questionable habits, or blind spots?
> It's trivial to add a matrix to account for neutrino masses
The matrix you are thinking of is presumably the PMNS matrix [1]. It's equivalent to the CKM matrix for quarks [2]. The purpose of both is to parametrize the mismatch between flavor [3] and mass eigenstates, not "to account for neutrino masses" or "explain their origin".
As far as the standard model is concerned, neutrino masses and quark masses all originate from Yukawa couplings [4] with the Higgs field. Adding such terms to Weinberg's original model of leptons is very much a trivial exercise, and was done already well before there was solid evidence for non-zero neutrino masses.
> it's possible experiments will say "Both the current ideas are wrong."
Assuming that by "Both current ideas" you mean Dirac vs Majorana mass, those are the only available relativistic invariants. For both to be wrong, special relativity would have to be wrong. Hopefully I don't need to explain how extraordinarily unlikely that is.
I should add that I am not in complete agreement with what he said in that speech: calling it "not essential to the science" strikes me as naive. Once you start juggling two standards of communication, you are on a slippery slope. If it's OK to lie to the funding public at large, what about politicians, funding bodies, colleagues in other disciplines competing for the same funding, journal editors asking you to review a rival's work in your own field? Where do you draw the line? Do you draw a line, or do you descend into a state of generalized charlatanry?
That's a very confused reading of thermodynamics, and going from stability landscapes to political systems to literal energy consumption is not a credible leap.
The real problem is psychology, not energy. As soon as you get one predatory narcissist/sociopath in a culture, and they're allowed to act freely, they will, with absolute inevitability, take advantage of everyone else's trust and cooperation and destroy any culture of mutual good will.
Energy is irrelevant to this. It will happen at any level of technology.
That leap reminds me of the Soviet Unions official ideology/non-religion “Dialectical Materialism”. It had the goal of explaining everything in the world, from the dynamics of atoms to the global communist revolution, with one common logic. To make it sound like the ideology of the system was based on the rules of nature itself.
9/11 was the turning point. We'd been fed a future "in the year 2000." When we got there, that future turned into a nostalgic vision of the past.
It's still possible to imagine new bright futures, but that kind of imagination is very much against a cultural tide that's fervently regressive and nostalgic.
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