Scale and Measurement: part 2.

So last week I talked about the importance of scale and units of measurement:
When measuring something as gnarly as a coastline, the smaller your measuring stick, the larger the final number you end up with. That means that when someone hands you the final measurement, you need to know the scale they were working on, or the number doesn't mean too much. I also claimed that there is a 'best' scale to work on for a given project. You probably don't want to measure the British coastline with a 1mm measuring stick, since it'd take forever, you don't need that level of detail for most applications, and the final value would be constantly changing at that level anyways due to erosion, tides, ect. Today I'm going to try to tie this idea into some more abstract issues like zoning laws and art.

I had an interesting talk with my dad the other week, which is actually what got me going on this whole line of thought in the first place. He moved to a new community a few years ago, and he's recently started to become involved in local politics. He told me about a public meeting he'd recently gone to about setting up new zoning guidelines for their small community, with the intention of keeping out a big box store that wanted to set up shop.

I should mention at this point that my dad is a pretty interesting fellow: he's in his 70's, and over the course of his life has worked as everything from a Wallstreet bond reporter to sculptor to industrial psychologist to cabinet-maker to site-planner/landscape architect. He's also the one who got me into complexity theory and nonlinear systems. Suffice to say, he had an interesting take on zoning guidelines. After listening to people squabble over determining exact square-foot limitations and the like for most of the meeting he pointed out that if they just ended up creating a set of rigid guidelines for the sole purpose of keeping out this store, two things would likely happen: First, even if they did keep this store out of the town, rules always come with unintended consequences. For example, if they decided that no stores would be granted permits that were more than 50 feet deep as a way of limiting size, they'd end up with strip malls instead of box stores (personally, he said he preferred the one big box to a strip mall, because at least with the box there'd be a chance to leverage the developer into doing things for the community you'd never get out of 30 different store owners). Second, once all the rules were laid down, there was a good chance that the box store would be able to game them anyways. For example, I read a while back about a Wallmart that was only allowed to build a certain size store due to zoning, so they just built two right next to one another and connected them with a covered walkway. Sigh. The big problem with rigid guidelines is that once you have the rules set down you lose the ability to deny a proposal that's weasled its way around them. They can end up being a way to provide rope for your own hanging.

As an alternative, my dad suggested that they think about what kind of community they wanted big picture, and how to shape those ideals into a number of broad guidelines that gave the committee more latitude in making decisions. Instead of just square footage limitations, they could talk in terms of relationship to the community. To tie this back into the whole scale thing, his idea here was that sticking to fine-toothed rigid guidelines was actually the wrong idea in this case, and that a looser, larger-scale approach might let them do a better job of preserving their community.

Here's another example: I read an interesting New York Times article a while back by Errol Morris about a fellow named Van Meegeren, who forged Vermeer paintings (think 'girl with a pearl earing') during WWII. A couple of books have recently come out about him, and Mr. Morris interviewed one of the authors about how Van Meegeren got away with it and what made his paintings believable. Here's an excerpt (the full article is here):

ERROL MORRIS: I’m fascinated by your use of “The Uncanny Valley.”

EDWARD DOLNICK: That’s one of my favorite parts of the book. But I wasn’t sure whether it should be included in the book. I was on the fence about it. I thought it might be too indulgent.

ERROL MORRIS: Indulgent?

EDWARD DOLNICK: Well, it’s a digression. You’re talking about paintings and forgery and what oil paintings look like, and then you say: let me tell you a cool thing about robots! Before this new spate of Van Meegeren books, they always squeezed him into a frame that I don’t think fits, that he was like other forgers, that he did these close copies, that he tried to make his forged Vermeers look like real Vermeers. If you really looked at Van Meegeren’s Vermeers, you would see that Van Meegeren’s story couldn’t be that story, even though people told it that way.

ERROL MORRIS: Could you explain to me the concept of “The Uncanny Valley,” as you use it in your book?

[The Uncanny Valley is a concept developed by the Japanese robot scientist Masahiro Mori. It concerns the design of humanoid robots. Mori’s theory is relatively simple. We tend to reject robots that look too much like people. Slight discrepancies and incongruities between what we look like and what they look like disturb us. The closer a robot resembles a human, the more critical we become, the more sensitive to slight discrepancies, variations, imperfections. However, if we go far enough away from the humanoid, then we much more readily accept the robot as being like us. This accounts for the success of so many movie robots — from R2-D2 to WALL-E. They act like humans but they don’t look like humans. There is a region of acceptability — the peaks around The Uncanny Valley, the zone of acceptability that includes completely human and sort of human but not too human. The existence of The Uncanny Valley also suggests that we are programmed by natural selection to scrutinize the behavior and appearance of others. Survival no doubt depends on such an innate ability. — E.M.]

EDWARD DOLNICK: You would think a close copy would be the goal of a forger, but it might not be a smart way to go. If you were a brilliant technician it might be an acceptable strategy, but my forger, Van Meegeren, is not as good as that. So if he’s going to try to pass himself off as Vermeer, he isn’t going to do it by painting “The Girl With Two Pearl Earrings.” [3] He’s going to get in trouble, because that’s asking for a side-by-side comparison, and he’s not good enough to get away with that.

Now here’s the point of The Uncanny Valley: as your imitation gets closer and closer to the real thing, people think, “Good, good, good!” — but then when it’s very close, when it’s within 1 percent or something, instead of focusing on the 99 percent that is done well, they focus on the 1 percent that you’re missing, and you’re in trouble. Big trouble. I wonder if it’s true in general: if one group, one music group, does a cover of a famous song, that if they do a pretty good job you think it’s pretty good, and if they get close, instead of thinking, “Boy, that’s really good,” you focus on what’s missing and think, “Gee, they shouldn’t have bothered, why don’t they do their own stuff?”

Pretty cool, huh? I feel like this idea of the Uncanny Valley relates to "How long is the coastline of Great Britain" in the sense that the unit of measurement can be thought of as a proxy for the level of detail. Scale makes a big difference, and when it comes to things like art, stories, and realistic robots, the more information included, the more flawless its execution needs to be. I'm grasping a bit here, but I think this is because people naturally zone in on the scale of a piece, then judge its quality in terms of that scale, automatically filling in the details if it's a large-scale sketch. At the low-detail end, drawing two dots and a line in a fogged up window is enough to activate your fusiform face area and make you see a face, but if on the high-detail end I try to draw a friend from a picture, all you're going to see are the small things I screw up (such as the number of eyes and nostrils).

Another example that goes along with all of this are movie sequals that should never have been made. The first Matrix was an incredible movie on its own, and it was a complete story; once you [SPOILER] found out that Neo was The One, the rest was a given. We knew he would eventually triumph, and we could fill in the gaps perfectly well if left to our own devices. Yet for some inexplicable reason, the Wachowski brothers decided to thrash their way through another 2 movies, tearing the whole story apart in the process. Now if those last two movies had been, well, Good, they would have been a pleasure and enhanced the original (like the original Star Wars trilogy), but it seemed like the Wachowski bros just couldn't pull off the whole story at that level of detail. My point is that they didn't have to keep going: they could have told an excellent and complete story on a slightly more abstract scale.
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When I think about all this, I kind of picture a microscope dial in my head that I zoom in and out, trying to get the right level of detail. Artists get into trouble a lot when they zoom in too far and try to tell us too much, or I suppose they can also get in trouble when they don't tell us enough, either. If they say too much without nailing it, it feels contrived, and if they say too little without nailing it, it's feels wooden. It seems like it's really difficult to know when you've hit the sweet spot in scale, told just enough but not too much, whether it's art, writing, or any other creative process.

So why did I decide to harp on this whole Scale thing? What was I trying to get at with all these examples? Well, the cognitive linguist George Lakoff says that most of the abstract meaning in language relies on spatial or 'embodied' metaphors: (e.g., moving forward, no turning back, looking deep inside, feeling down,etc.). We constantly use this kind of language to automatically to frame and conceptualize our thoughts, yet most of this spatial language refers to directional movements in three dimensions without reference to scale. I think that using the idea of scale as a spatial metaphors creates a lot of conceptual power. In a way it gives more cognitive 'space' in which to work, and it becomes a way to map relationships and talk about similarities without being stuck using linear spatial comparisons (up/down, backwards/forward, etc.). I guess these posts have been an attempt to see how much mileage I could get out of this idea.