Chasing The Over-a-Hundred Prize

The problem in deciding whether a scientific result or a new innovation is a "breakthrough," that is, the opposite of noise, is that one needs to see all aspects of the idea—and there is always some opacity that time, and only time, can dissipate. ...

Likewise, seemingly uninteresting results that go unnoticed, can, years later, turn out to be breakthroughs.

So time can act as a cleanser of noise by confining to its dustbins all these overhyped works. Some organizations even turn such scientific production into a cheap spectator sport, with ranking of the "ten hottest papers" in, say, rectal oncology or some such sub-sub-specialty.

If we replace scientific results with scientists, we often get the same neomaniac hype. There is a disease to grant a prize for a promising scientist "under forty," a disease that is infecting economics, mathematics, finance, etc. Mathematics is a bit special because the value of its results can be immediately seen—so I skip the criticism. Of the fields I am familiar with, such as literature, finance, and economics, I can pretty much ascertain that the prizes given to those under forty are the best reverse indicator of value... The worst effect of these prizes is penalizing those who don't get them and debasing the field by turning it into an athletic competition.

Should we have a prize, it should be for "over a hundred": it took close to one hundred and forty years to validate the contribution of one Jules Regnault, who discovered optionality and mapped it mathematically—along with what we dubbed the philosopher's stone. His work stayed obscure all this time."

N.N. Taleb
Antifragile (2012)
pp. 329-330

These prizes have their counterparts in the music world, and there too they are well-known as strong "reverse indicators of value," at least to everyone outside the immediate social orbit of the committee and the recipients. A certain amount of focus on the under-forties arises from a good-faith response to a good-faith criticism: lifetime achievement awards are obscene when the elderly achiever really could have used that money to stay afloat during their starving-artist years. This, together with the realization that many small grants to individual artists would do more good than a few massive grants to superstars and large organizations, has (re)shaped the landscape somewhat for the better. I suspect there are good intentions behind this; yet NNT's observations here supply the necessary damned if you do caveats. Radical postmodernists get the most attention for rejecting the cleansing effect of time, for junking the Thirty Year Rule that historians formerly observed, etc., and yet functionally the bourgeois mainstream has also rejected these things, much more quietly but with equal thoroughness and equally strident rationalizations. In one respect it is obvious that people need the money more when they are younger. The problem, though, is that it is not so easy to see the future. To attempt to do so is a fragilista maneuver through and through.

In borrowing this Talebism, I am certainly wary of embracing Taleb's peculiar brand of Darwinism. He is not the least bit convincing when he claims, after all else he has written here and prior, to be content with merely passing on his genes and riding off into the Darwinian sunset. Clearly he lives to read, argue, eat and drink, put mice down people's shirts, and so on. (How I wish I'd had this last idea when I was sitting in Dr. Damschroder's theory classes!) I'm not in favor of a full Hunger Games approach to artisthood. The point, rather, that Taleb's arguments reveal, and which is in my experience simply not yet acknowledged in artists' circles, is that the fragilizing effects of awards are even worse than the trappings of a pure survival competition. They compound "cumulative advantage," lead to "Matthew effects," and claim to see the future. They "penaliz[e] those who don't get them and debas[e] the field by turning it into an athletic competition." I'm sure we will continue to have them even so. We all might as well apply just in case. But please don't believe anything anyone involved says about the recipients or the process, and please don't believe that competitions and awards are about supporting the next generation's finest practitioners. They cannot be about that. The list of Pulitzer winners speaks for itself here.

Synchronically, lifetime achievement awards are indefensible; diachronically they are the only defensible kind of award in fields that are, for our purposes here, the opposite of math, where the value of results is very rarely immediately seen, indeed where this value is all but guaranteed to change, and where this guarantee in and of itself does not need to be elevated to a risk by our having previously bet against it. Of course we can collectively decide to redefine value as strictly limited to that which can be immediately seen. It may seem like this has already happened; but watch those pomos carefully, especially when they don't know they are being watched, and you will find all the evidence you'll ever need that this presentism is no more a part of who they really are than their mismatched tube socks.

Three Views on Competition

-I-
Mid-quarantine sports media has gone nostagic out of necessity, with the recent Michael Jordan documentary leading the charge, and thereby it has been pointed out that MJ's pathological competitiveness would today run afoul of numerous sensitivities. Leaving aside for now the litigation of those sensitivities and the triteness of the observation, I think it is nonetheless an observation worth dwelling upon and extending: the games are mere escapist entertainment and the Darwinistic element is, unlike the analogous Roman spectacles, more symbolic than real; yet the people are real, and if they are not usually worth truly feeling sorry for, that is not to say that their outrageous salaries somehow void their basic human entitlement to dignity and health. MJ in his more infamous moments undoubtedly created a Hostile Work Environment. Since his playing career ended, American pro sports have seen a handful of high-profile breakdowns, AWOLs, and early retirements which are either partly or wholly attributable to similar behavior by less-revered teammates. The social ground has indeed shifted beneath the feet of bigtime sports, making this human toll seem less collateral and more integral. It is doubly inconvenient, then, to be told that MJ's now-questionable motivational tactics were integral rather than peripheral to his success. I love sports and I also think it is okay to be uneasy with this, i.e. to impose today's standards on yesterday's events. Nothing would ever get better if that type of hindsight was not allowed. The anti-civs can howl all they want about PCness and Revisionist History, but even they know that there is a right and a wrong way to treat people. Some of them may even have had an experience that (gasp!) changed their mind! I certainly have...and somehow I still love watching sports. Love of sports is, paraphrasing a girlfriend-of-a-friend, my only "normal" trait. I take no offense to the comment; rather, taking it at face value, I choose to strategically deploy this aspect of my public-facing self in those tough social situations where it is crucial to seem normal. But of course in my remaining abnormal moments, it has only gotten more difficult with time to ignore everything about sports that is unseemly.

For the most part, even pro sports lockerrooms have at least met the new sensitivities halfway. The greatest countervailing force to this belated enlightenment is not the odd Old School jock, but rather the amount of money at stake. Rule-bending/breaking is itself something of an art form, and exceedingly thin competitive margins in high-stakes endeavors tend to encourage its consolidation and refinement. MJ of course authored the definitive work of contextual rule-bending when he...created separation from Utah's Bryon Russell in the closing seconds of the 1998 NBA Finals (his only signature moment that I vividly remember watching on live TV). It is a "work" without parallel even in MJ's oeuvre, by, of and for that moment and that moment only. Among the commentators I listen to, the ones who not only were there but also have dug deepest into all of this after the fact tend to emphasize a similarly contextual, circumstantial, incentive-driven understanding of MJ's most infamous interpersonal conflicts. Context and circumstance are crucial to the sensitivity question, no matter where you fall on it. It is of course possible for high-stakes athletic competition to unfold with minimal "personal" friction, but it is not possible 100 percent of the time. Similarly, high-level competition might emerge without correspondingly high stakes, but it probably won't. A long-winded way of saying: sports cannot be sanitized much further than they already have without harming their intrinsic appeal to "normal" people (or, as the case may be, to the little tiny "normal" person that lives inside even of weirdos like me).

For now, a basketball game still has a winner and a loser, and the team sports franchise remains nothing less than the contemporary archetype of patriarchal, non-particularistic organization. The Chicago Bulls can turnover personnel a dozen times and still be the Chicago Bulls. If the rarefied air of hyper-thin competitive margins is then thought to be first and foremost hazardous to one's health, and thus unseemly on specifically that basis, this represents a particularistic turn which is anathema to what bigtime sports are. If the human toll is no longer acceptable then I will fall in line with that new reality, but I don't have to enjoy the new sports-like product. I'm not very normal, but I am too normal to enjoy games where no one wins or loses. If we now "root for players, not for teams," as even some of the above-mentioned sports commentators claim to, then it does seem that winning and losing no longer matters. I can't relate to this, but I think I at least understand it. Why we would continue to channel competition-averse desires through sport is, conversely, something I can't even understand.


-II-
The current slogan of the North American Scrabble Players Association is, "Making Words, Building Friendships." What exactly does this imply? (Or not?) Perhaps most basically, a matter-of-fact concurrence with reality: even I have made at least two unusually good/close friends on the Scrabble scene, and the proportion of people I find tolerable is non-negligibly greater than the baseline expectation. This being as it may, if an equivalence is what is implied in the slogan, I think this is wholly illogical and dishonest. Certainly it is not in concurrence with the reality I've observed. There is at least as much animosity as friendship in Scrabble; this much was palpable in the room from my very first expedition to a NASPA-sanctioned club. What has only become clear with experience is that this animosity exceeds the mere social background radiation one expects to find everywhere; it is, rather, intrinsic to the game itself. The disproportionately extreme consequences of seemingly marginal strategic decisions make Scrabble as much about mastering one's own emotions as about cognitive ability or competitive spirit, and no one in this pressure-cooker is a perfect master of their emotions, no matter how friendly they are the rest of the time. If you want to engender friendship, you definitely do not place people into this sort of dynamic interaction with chance; and if you have a friend-target in mind, it's best that this friend-target not embody the opposition in a zero-sum test of the two acquaintances' comparative abilities to manage said dynamic interaction with chance. Given some of the dust-ups I've witnessed, I give myself relatively high marks for civility; but mere civility is not friendship. I confess that I find friendship (d)elusive here, not only in the heat of competition, where it is colored by visceral emotion, but also upon distanced reflection, where it is colored by a wider interest in sport as expounded upon above. I grant that the drawing of any analogies between the NBA and the NASPA strains credulity. Nonetheless, both a game of basketball and a game of Scrabble have a winner and a loser; if the analogy can be extended only that far, this is nonetheless quite a significant fact with many significant implications. As such we might add that both are ritualized, sanitized reenactments of base instincts, or some flavor of that old trope. What does this phylogenetically distant basis in primal violence mean? Is it the distance or the violence which is more meaningful? Sensitivity is the obsession of the moment for hard-liners on both sides that question, but I think the answer really depends more on our intelligence than on our sensitivities. (I also believe the covariability of intelligence and sensitivity to be generally overstated¹, though I do need to learn more about this and could be swayed.) For the most part, sentient adults are capable of compartmentalizing ritualized reenactments from so-called real life. As a species we are, I think, quite capable of civility per se in this scenario, if not always of friendship; and as the eminently social species, there is much to be gained if we can achieve this, and certainly also lost if we cannot: the ventilating function of such ritualized, non-destructive competitive outlets, the lexico-cognitive dimension of Scrabble as healthy mental exercise, the greater acuity of such exercise-benefits when they are channeled by competition rather than pursued casually, and so on. Call these the Extrinsic Benefits if you insist, though really they are intrinsic to this uniquely human institution. Of course the institution of friendship matters too. But if friendship is your end, tournament Scrabble is a strange choice of means. If friendship were the ultimate aim, what wouldn't we change about Scrabble? And if winning and losing isn't what really matters, what are we doing playing a game that has a winner and a loser?


-III-
My 2002 summer expedition to the Aebersold workshop in Louisville was rather fruitless from a playing perspective, but the lengthy evening concerts were, as many others have remarked, themselves worth the trip. By now most of the finer details have blurred, but I specifically recall a Don Braden-Eric Alexander tenor battle not for the music (which I'm sure was fine nonetheless) but for Braden's mid-set remark to the assembled newbs. Paraphrasing: it can't help but be a competition when the two of us are up here together, and this is fine as long as it serves the music. I can't help but agree, which leads us seamlessly back into navel-gazing: is competition thought able to serve a constructive purpose here because there is, metaphors and figures of speech aside, no winner or loser in music? Certainly there is an aesthetic dimension to sport: John Stockton is said to have described the Dream Team scrimmages as "poetry;" and Scrabble played at the highest level certainly has struck many an informed observer as "beautiful." But only in the case of exhibition games can I imagine a convincing argument that aesthetics are essential to sport, even as they are quite essential to my own interest in it. Conversely, as Debussy would have it, "Pleasure is the law" in music. That assertion can be problematized from any number of abstract ethical perspectives, same as can ritualized competition; but the overwhelming thrust of real social practice, rational or not, is on the side of pleasure here. Hence I think the burden is on the ethicizer/moralizer to demonstrate that pleasure and competition alike are entirely about wants and not at all about needs. I do not believe this to be true in either case.


1. Anecdotally, the phenomenon of the pathologically cutthroat pickup basketball player always seemed to me a product of vulnerable class position, not of individual psychology, and certainly not of intelligence. Where individual psychology comes in, I suppose, is in the case of players whose competitive drive stems from perceived vulnerability that is not necessarily real. MJ and Tom Brady are often mentioned in this connection, as is the significance of what I am calling "perceived vulnerability" (as opposed to the real kind) in the realm of politics and demagoguery.

Prescriptions

I've always been of a mind that prescribing repertoire for competitions, grad school auditions and other such circumstances is short sighted. One's choice of repertoire says a little bit about their technique, but a lot about their musicianship. Committees aren't ignorant of this, but rather keenly aware of it; direct comparison of players' execution of the same set of tasks is to be favored because it enables the imposition of more objective criteria in a way that isn't possible when everyone is playing different music. Personally, I don't think that's a good thing. Any conceit of objectivity in a music competition is a mirage anyway; I'd rather everyone heeded the total musical package, whatever that is to them. I know that if I ever found myself sitting on a committee where I was asked to assimilate someone else's value system, I'd certainly want to know why I was invited in the first place.

When it comes to instruments like the tuba, I wonder if committees aren't more apt to prescribe repertoire simply because there is so little of it to choose from. A tubist-composer or -arranger who creates even a merely serviceable new piece for themselves to play has stacked the deck substantially in their own favor (you'll gather from that statement that I personally consider most all of the usual suspects to be less than serviceable, if not as showcases, then as music, which is more important). On the other hand, one wonders if mediocre music is ever prescribed precisely in order to see who can make the best of it. If personalization is the goal, though, better to let everyone choose (or even create) their own music in the first place.