10/10 should be required reading for all humans
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garden-path_sentence
You read "increases" as a transitive verb, and then reach the "collapses" at the end of the sentence and have to re-parse the whole thing when you realize it was really intransitive.
Changing the words is going to lose some of the low-amplitude frequencies but I'll try.
It's a model for why (call the following X) things get harder when you try to make them more perfect. Let's take X for granted.
You can ask yourself "why is X true?". One model you could have for this is the "finishing touches" model: as a thing gets closer to perfection, identifying imperfections and rectifying them is harder simply out of search constraints (the less of something the harder they are to find).
Another model you could have is the "dimensional model". A thing is great when it's great along many axes. The more dimensions you add, the harder it is to search in them for perfection. Related: the curse of dimensionality.
And here he posits a new model, the "resolution model": the finer the look at what is good, the more 'options' you have at each stage to choose from; it's not just that you make the broad and then refine within, but that you are actually building the refined thing from the beginning.
He then tries to show how some kinds of creation tolerate movement in the parameter space better.
No model is perfect, so each of these ideas captures some attribute of the difficulty and maps it to a mental structure that is more easily manipulable by the modeler.
The typical owl drawing is a few circles and then the more owly bits, and then the feathers on the owly bits, and then the shadows on the feathers on the owly bits. And this is a method to reduce the kind of problem he's talking about. But if you want to make the perfect owl, perhaps there is an element of making your circle just so, already accounting for the shadows on the feathers on the owly bits before any of the precursors are made.
Anyway, this is imperfect because I am necessarily shaving off the hair on the ball to show you it's spherical. And his entire model is that the hair determines the ball.
So we must live in the world where those of us who discover a point in ideaspace draw imperfect maps until the one who can draw a good map arrives at the same point. And perhaps some points aren't even well-mappable by the discoverers. And perhaps the communicator never realizes he has arrived at the point he was told about and so never speaks of it.
We fumble in the dark desert for an oasis. Unlucky universe to be in.
Certainly, some artists work in the way they describe. Maybe even "most", who knows. But there are plenty of artists that do not. I've known plenty of artists to go straight to the detail in one corner of their piece and work linearly all the way across and down the canvas. I don't know how they do it, it certainly doesn't work for me, but obviously different people work in different ways.
It's more on par with something you'll find on lesswrong.
The author had a shower thought. It was poorly explored, poorly argued and deliberately packaged in complex language to hide the lack of substance. The bibtex reference at the end is the cherry on top.
It's such a simple idea. And it already has a name, diminishing returns. I don't know what prompted this article but it wasn't insight.
It's a common experience for an artist that everything they're doing to a piece makes it look like a total failure and far below the quality they were aspiring to until they do one final layer of polish and the piece transforms from sub-par to spectacular at the final stage. Of course, there are also scenarios where no amount of polish can fix it because the artist simply wasn't good enough and didn't find the right decisions at the final stage and other scenarios where there were no right decisions and no amount of skill could have fixed fatal flaws earlier in the decision making.
The exquisite agony of art is that all 3 scenarios feel subjectively almost identical in the middle of the creation process and so much of art is hoping we come up with some reliable process of divination to tease apart the micro-differences that give you an indication of what path you're on.
OP is proposing a model for why this is this is the case but unless you're an experienced creative, you don't understand the problem phenomena that this is identifying in the first place.
> The act of creation is fractal exploration–exploitation under optimal feedback control. When resolution increases the portion of parameter space that doesn't make the artifact worse (acceptance volume) collapses. Verification latency and rate–distortion combine into a precision tax that scales superlinearly with perceived quality.
Is this just saying that it's ok if doodles aren't good, but the closer you get to the finished work, the better it has to be? If your audience can't understand what the hell you're talking about for simple ideas, you've gone too far.