Art is the one medium in which one cannot lie successfully When we build, say, a business area in which all (or practically all) are engaged in earning their livings, or a residential area in which everyone is deep in the demands of domesticity, or a shopping area dedicated to the exchange of cash and commodities—in short, where the pattern of human activity contains only one element, it is impossible for the architecture to achieve a convincing variety—convincing of the known facts of human variation. The designer may vary color, texture and form until his drawing instruments buckle under the strain, proving once more that art is the one medium in which one cannot lie successfully. Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities arttruthliesmedia
The effort heuristic Psychologists have noted that people tend to place greater artistic value on images when they can see the work that has gone into them — a tendency known as the “effort heuristic”. They are also more likely to connect emotionally with the work if they can detect the human hand, says Goldsmiths’ Chamberlain. “There’s an argument that if we see a brush stroke, we almost recreate it, and that’s part of the connection we feel with the artist — you can feel the intention.” Perhaps to capitalize on this, some architects now show presentation drawings that look hand-drawn but are actually generated entirely by computer. “It’s totally fake,” says Brillhart. “They just take a computer image into Photoshop and put filters over it to make it look like it’s drawn by hand. It’s kind of amusing — instead of just sitting down and drawing for an hour, they spend eight hours making it look like a hand drawing.” Nick Jones, Back to the Drawing Board liespsychologydeception
95%-ile isn't that good An Article by Dan Luu danluu.com Reaching 95Mistakes at the top Waste as little effort as possible on low competence talent
Reaching 95 Reaching 95%-ile isn't very impressive because it's not that hard to do. I think this is one of my most ridiculable ideas. It doesn't help that, when stated nakedly, that sounds elitist. But I think it's just the opposite: most people can become (relatively) good at most things. Note that when I say 95%-ile, I mean 95%-ile among people who participate, not all people (for many activities, just doing it at all makes you 99%-ile or above across all people). I'm also not referring to 95%-ile among people who practice regularly. The "one weird trick" is that, for a lot of activities, being something like 10%-ile among people who practice can make you something like 90%-ile or 99%-ile among people who participate. skillpractice
Mistakes at the top Personally, in every activity I've participated in where it's possible to get a rough percentile ranking, people who are 95%-ile constantly make mistakes that seem like they should be easy to observe and correct. "Real world" activities typically can't be reduced to a percentile rating, but achieving what appears to be a similar level of proficiency seems similarly easy. skillmistakes