Imagine that you were not a musician but had a serious profession, for example a pilot. And crash every sixth landing…
Besides you could get this result by random guessing. The probability to answer correctly all 6 questions is 1/2^6=1/64. And the probability to get 5 question right is 6/2 * (1/64) = 3/64. So the probability to get 5 or more questions right is 4/64=1/16~6%. So we cannot exclude with 5% confidence level that you guessed at random.
And for some reason the people who get much lower scores are silent…
Another example of this was the recent Banksy art sale booth in NYC. The graffiti artist Banksy, whose works usually sell for six figures, set up a booth in a flea market and offered some of his works for sixty dollars.
We covered that in another thread and IMO, that wasn’t very fair. If I came up to you and told you I had real, original Jackson Pollack’s would you believe me? Here, he did a series of paintings on 8.5x11 loose leaf paper, they’re worth $500,000, you can have them for twenty bucks. Does that sound legit or does it sound like I’m selling bad Coach purse ripoffs?
Also, until that tourist sells the painting for $31k, it’s only worth $60. Remember, something is only worth what someone else is willing to pay for it. My parents have a really, really nice pool table in their basement, full competition sized, matched Italian slate, came from a pool hall. Both times that we’ve had it recovered the people doing it have said it’s worth about $12,000. He can’t even get someone to give him $3,000 for it. So, no, it’s not worth $12,000.
And for some reason, you ignored the other part of my post. Thank you, I was aware that my score was not some Herculean feat that couldn’t be accomplished by chance, and don’t find discussing that interesting. I do think it’s interesting you seem to think either the subway experiment, or the one where they were testing people with recordings say anything but the two items I listed. They say diddly about our ability to discern art, for a multitude of reasons.
And there have been several blind wine tests were famous and expensive wines lost too unknown and cheap. The most famous is, probably, The Judgement of Paris. There was another one by Federic Brochet, and a recent much publicized in America experiment by Goldstein.
So we are dealing here with a very general phenomenon.
What do you want to say by this? The link says that the legend is false. However the rest of the stories discussed in this thread are true. There are more stories like that.
For example, this one which tells how Ivy League and Oxbridge folk could not tell Charles Dickens from the worst writer in history
Did anyone see Milton Fairman’s article? Weingarten gives only month of publication, not the date. And I need the date for inter-library document delivery request.
I had sent an email with the same question to Weingarten, but did not get any reply.
If we’re going to revive this zombie, let’s revive the goddamned zombie.
You know what I want to see? I want someone to make a website with bits and pieces of various sermons and holy texts and philosophical tracts, and see if people really can tell the difference between their Holy And Exalted To The Highest Heavens One True Faith and the Filthy And Abhorrent Crime Against Nature Heresy practiced by those scum down the block. Sure, Southern Baptist and Theravada Buddhism will be a walk, but High-Church Anglican and Roman Catholic? The Koran used by the Twelvers and the Koran used by the Salafists? If I pick and choose right, I can probably get a Bible-Believing Baptist to agree to the teachings of a Wahhabi cleric. Or, worse, a hippy-dippy Unitarian-Universalist.
Or is that insane? Is that precisely the wrong attitude to take? Is that a stupidly reductionist conception which misses the point entirely? Does the relevant concept adhere, not to the specific words and props, but to a larger social and political context where it becomes normative, performative, and, sometimes, intersectional?
Nah, couldn’t be. That’s all egghead hippie crap, like dolphins and rainbows.
I think there are two general ways to interpret this: one is that the idea of a classic or a masterpiece is BS, and the other is that people’s enjoyment of an experience is based on context and their expectations.
Somebody already did this trick using sacred Hindu and Christian texts and someone else could not tell the difference. It was in early 20th or late 19th century as far as I recall.
Do you think such test would be interesting today? The so-called intellectuals do not believe in any religion anyway. They believe in Darwin and apestract art.
Probably the only place where one can find Chicago Evening Post (the newspaper which made the experiment and afterward published the article) is Chicago Public Library
The philosophical question is one of *epistemological arrogance *or expansion. We tend to think we know more than we do. People who invest time can become better at discerning differences and mapping what they perceive to quality criteria. But we all tend to think we can do it in FAR more categories than we actually can. And we all tend to think that our quality criteria are more broadly accepted than they really are.
There are a couple of areas where I am very comfortable with my ability to discern quality. And there are hundreds of areas where I am comfortable acting like I am
And what about those folks who award Pulitzer Prizes? Why the original articles by Fairman and Hacket did not get one and the article by Weingarten published 77 years later did? Did the Pulitzer committee show *epistemological arrogance *or expansion?
What would you like to hear? I can’t speak to all the variables that might put a different slant on that set of events.
I would come at your OP a different way: let’s say the fundamental assertion is correct. What is supposed to happen differently because of it? Humans are unreliable and make mistakes and impose patterns and narratives where none exist. What’s going to change?
I heard about one particular critic who gave someone’s original performance a negative review, then years later gave a rave review to the exact same recording released under Hatto’s name.
