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Comment by swayvil | Hacker News Reader

I think that by "personality" he means "story".

Like, a cool story that you can somehow attach to the product. So when people see the product they also think the story.

And then they think, "woah, what a great product!". (But what they really mean is "woah, what a great story!")

I see this in the art scene. It's like the art-piece isn't enough for people. They want an artist's statement. A philosophy. Who made it, why did they make it, where did they make it. Tell me the 20-chapter story of your heroic struggle from ugliness to beauty...

(Personally, I think what's going on here is either dim art or blind people. Either of which will produce a failure to make that connection)

Which is to say, it's like people don't care what they see, hear, smell etc. What they care about is what they think. It's all about the story.

And that certainly says something about people and how they interact with reality.

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> I see this in the art scene. It's like the art-piece isn't enough for people. They want an artist's statement. A philosophy. Who made it, why did they make it, where did they make it. Tell me the 20-chapter story of your heroic struggle from ugliness to beauty...

This is also becoming more common in the film scene. The Revenant is a recent and big example of the phenomenon. People liked to talk about the grueling filming process, how all the artists involved broke their backs to make this movie, and I think it seriously altered how the movie was perceived, changing a perfectly fine movie to something somehow transcendent.

Another, smaller, example is Ryan Gosling in La La Land. Some people made it a point that he learned to play the piano for the bits on screen.

It's as if the off-screen authenticity alters the on-screen authenticity. (Whether this is true or not is up for debate, and has been since method acting's inception, if not before.)

Without cultural context, you might as well be looking at a mysterious ancient artifact from a lost civilization, or maybe procedurally generated random content from a video game.

It's nice when you can get the joke without it having to be explained to you, but that just means you share enough culture to get it, where a foreigner wouldn't. It doesn't mean you're smarter, it means you happened to have the education needed.

The thing here is, there is no joke. There is no associated story or explanation necessary for appreciating the artwork. The artwork contains the whole of what the artist intends to deliver.

We've got this weird situation where people can't just look with their eyes and hear with their ears. For them it's all about thinking. They want something to think about. They want a story/joke/explanation. For them the action is all in their head.

It's almost never self-contained. At the most basic level, if you don't know the language, writing is just meaningless scribbles. Scales and chords have no particular meaning by themselves. Associating a major scale with happiness and minor with sadness is something you learn.

I think about this sort of thing a lot.

Imagine you stumbled upon a band that produced music objectively just as good as The Beatles. But they're just a pack of rich trust-fund kids, and nobody has ever heard of them. Is their music really as good as The Beatles, then? How much of The Beatles' greatness is due to the raw music, and how much is due to their story and canonicity?

I see your point. (I personally think their goodness is due to raw music. They produced very high-quality stuff.)

But people vary in their inclination/ability to appreciate music and other such art. Some consume music. Others consume music + story.

This makes me think of bad rap. Rap is basically music that markets its own story right there in the song. If you like the story then you will turn a blind ear to the bad music. I think this happens a lot.

Also, maybe the consumption of stories comes more naturally to people than the consumption of sights and sounds. Maybe it's easier.

Also, another speculation, maybe digital music goes down rougher than analog. Maybe there is an unconscious difficulty there, like it hurts our throat to swallow it. Which has made modern digital music less appealing relative to stories.

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