In my experience you unfortunately just can't put 'surprise' at the root. That's just one form. You'll discover that literally the opposite is also true, and that people will crack up laughing when exactly what they expect to happen ends up happening.
Catchphrases are a classic example of this, but it's everywhere. I once wrote a pretty terrible sketch where Sean Connery kept saying 'schlap' over and over. By the end of it, there was a sentence where it was obviously, blatantly, absolutely going to end in the word 'schlap'. You could /feel/ the the audience hang on that expectation, and when it inevitably hit, they lost their minds. Zero surprise. Zero subversion of expectation. Brought the house down.
"Benign violation" is the only generalization that I have found comes close to being true. Why did that line land even though it was no surprise? Because while it didn't violate expectations, it violated a lot of other norms (mockery, incorrect pronunciation, domestic abuse). And in fact, the more predictable it got, the funnier it got, because it simply became absurd that it was being uttered so frequently.
In any case, I have literally never been able to write anything funny from first principles like "surprise" or "benign violation". If you try, you ironically put yourself in the mindstate opposite to the nature of those terms. You actually need to forget the principles, to let go and be free, to reach anything that fits the principles.
Almost every expert recommends better diet, exercise and sleep, so I’m not sure why you’re viewing the “go natural” statement as a necessarily anti-expert one.
As far as I'm concerned, the author of this article has not made a strong enough argument to draw such a bold conclusion.
They point to patent research, showing that innovation in areas outside of computers and electronics has slowed down. Then admits "of course" computers and electronics aren't included in this. But computers and electronics dominate our world. If you exclude them and say "tech progress is slowing down!", you're saying almost nothing at all, because you've excluded the thing that accounts for our currently-alleged rapid rate of technological progress.
He does attempt to cover this point by asserting that increases in processor performance are slowing down. This is enough for him to draw the conclusion of: "for computers [...] the period of rapid exponential growth will soon become history." This is a massive logical leap. Processor performance isn't the only component of technological progress in the wide field of computers and electronics, and that's especially obvious in the current time where rapid progress is occurring in ML algorithms.
I think this subject is a worthy point of inquiry, but it seems to me that the article is simply taking facts and drawing unwarranted conclusions from them.
> At the time, there was nobody to compare them to.
Why do you assume this? When Sgt. Peppers came out in 1967 -- which we now mythologize as a revolutionary step -- that same year you had equally adventurous records by Pink Floyd, The Byrds, Love, Cream, The Doors, Frank Zappa, Captain Beefheart, Jimi Hendrix, Jefferson Airplane, the 13th Floor Elevators, and on and on.
If you draw yourself back to the early 60s, then there's still nothing about their music that other artists weren't making. If you want to say that they made the "rock band" thing happen, then that's highly debatable because there were an absolute plethora of garage rock (and surf rock) bands around at the time, and I'm sure they were compared endlessly to The Beach Boys. But even if they did make the "rock band" thing happen, that's a result of their popularity at the time and not necessarily whether their music was particularly unique.
Exactly. It's not that critics weren't able to recognize the genius of The Beatles, it's that they weren't obligated to assume it's there.
They could see clearly about how they actually felt when hearing the music; they could see without the mist of the mythology that now influences us to see The Beatles as revolutionary.
They were allowed to point to Motown and say "this has better songwriting", or early Pink Floyd and say "this is more experimental/adventurous", and they wouldn't have to factor in things like 'influence' when evaluating how they actually felt when listening to the music.
I’d argue that this sort of career choice intersection is actually not helpful for most.
Here’s why. For most people, there are plenty of things in this world that they’ve never tried that they’d enjoy the hell out of — especially if they get past an initial learning curve. There are plenty of things that they’ve never committed to long enough to know they have a serious aptitude for it (for example, it took me 5+ years of learning music to realise I’m a brilliant improviser, just because most early music training doesn’t even touch on it).
In my opinion, if someone isn’t sure what career to choose, the solution actually is: go out and try more stuff. A lot more stuff. Do something long enough that you get past the initial learning curve.
Once you’ve collected enough real world experience and data, then you can make an intersection of “what you’re good at”, “what you enjoy” and “what pays” — but you probably won’t even need to, since this is a trivial exercise compared to actually gaining that data in the first place.
I think many of the people who say that "happiness must come from within" are making a logical leap. It's true, you could go out and make lots of life changes yet still be unhappy. But that doesn't mean /every/ life change is futile for our happiness. Perhaps you just didn't change it in the right way!
From a more scientific perspective, there have been plenty of studies done on happiness, and it's virtually undeniable that our external environment has at least /some/ effect on our happiness.[1] I'd argue that one has to ignore or dismiss a massive wealth of studies in psychology to insist that happiness only comes from within.
The smoking and sugar consumption rate have both been declining in your country (Poland).[1][2]
So your statement that the tax is ineffective seems at best unfounded, and at worst, entirely false. It’s possible that there are other causes for the decrease, but you simply can’t say nothing has changed.
Catchphrases are a classic example of this, but it's everywhere. I once wrote a pretty terrible sketch where Sean Connery kept saying 'schlap' over and over. By the end of it, there was a sentence where it was obviously, blatantly, absolutely going to end in the word 'schlap'. You could /feel/ the the audience hang on that expectation, and when it inevitably hit, they lost their minds. Zero surprise. Zero subversion of expectation. Brought the house down.
"Benign violation" is the only generalization that I have found comes close to being true. Why did that line land even though it was no surprise? Because while it didn't violate expectations, it violated a lot of other norms (mockery, incorrect pronunciation, domestic abuse). And in fact, the more predictable it got, the funnier it got, because it simply became absurd that it was being uttered so frequently.
In any case, I have literally never been able to write anything funny from first principles like "surprise" or "benign violation". If you try, you ironically put yourself in the mindstate opposite to the nature of those terms. You actually need to forget the principles, to let go and be free, to reach anything that fits the principles.