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Entries: 4 (Private: )
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Comments: 0
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Start Date: 05-12-2015
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Last Update: 09-03-2015
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Views: 970
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Description: Exactly what it says on the tin.
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| Intelligence, rap battling, and loss of the culture |
Date Posted: 09-03-2015 at 10:48 PM - Comments (0) |
Note: This is a semi-sequel to a previous post on this journal, "The central point of the new/old heads debate." Reading that post prior to this one is not required, but is strongly recommended.
~~~
If you peruse the online text battles of yesteryear, you will find that there is a slow but unmistakable upward trend in complexity. This means that: multi sets are longer, they are held for more lines, punches have more layers of meaning, and such. This phenomenon has already been discussed at length in this journal; see the note above. In this post, I will discuss another aspect of this trend.
This aspect is the increasing intelligence of text battlers. This aspect appears to be its own cause and effect, creating an endless upward trend of intelligence. It is a consequence of the increasing complexity of text battles; as complexity's standards rise, so too must the verbal ability and creativity of its strongest practitioners. Otherwise, it will be difficult or impossible for someone to adhere to these standards.
(Oh, and everything I'm saying here is applicable to audio as well. It's just less pronounced in audio, as audio is less linguistically complicated than text.)
~~~
I'd like to clarify something here before we continue: that creativity, verbal ability, and intelligence are not the same thing.
Creativity is not an aspect of verbal ability or intelligence. However, there are strong correlations; also, without a certain level of verbal ability, even the most creative battler will be incapable of expressing their ideas in an effective form. Without a certain level of intelligence, a battler may struggle to write concise, easily-understood bars, or even operate the site.
Verbal ability, on the other hand, is an aspect of intelligence. While it is only one of many factors that contribute to intelligence, it has an extremely strong positive correlation with the others.
So when overall intelligence changes, creativity and verbal ability will follow. The larger the group being examined, the more noticeable this effect becomes.
Finally, while practice does make perfect, creativity, verbal ability, and intelligence cannot be improved much (as far as I know). Facets of text battling can be practiced, but people will have insurmountable ceilings regardless. Practice will not change the height of that ceiling; it will only get you closer to it.
~~~
The largest consequence of this is as follows:
To put it bluntly, people involved in the "gangster" culture from whence battle rap originated have a lower overall intelligence. (Please don't try to read any sort of racist or otherwise discriminatory bullshit into that statement.) When average intelligence increases in a group, such people will struggle to stay competitive in text battling. From the cultural foundation of a site, they will become the laughingstocks.
This means that certain elements of rap battling culture that were once integral fade away. The noble tradition of cussing out disliked users, mocking them endlessly, and generally being offensive towards them is replaced by an overall more "civil" atmosphere. Crews are no longer massive clubs - often exclusive ones - that foster a strong sense of identity and have huge beefs, but only words near a person's avatar that are occasionally insulted on the forums. (This all makes sense, as intelligence has a negative correlation with impulsivity, aggression, and herd-behavior/team identity.)
It also increases the barrier to entry. The higher the level of intelligence required to become a high-level battler, the fewer people will reach that level. While someone without the necessary abilities can battle indefinitely, the combination of mockery and dissatisfaction with their performance will discourage them from battling; some may even quit entirely.
~~~
I won't drop any names here, but many newer people mourn the loss of this culture. They wish that the violently aggressive insults, crew beefs, and generally harsher nature of times long past would re-emerge. What they do not understand is that the only people who can resurrect that culture are the very same low-tier battlers they mock.
I could discuss this for far more length and touch on many more points. If I wanted to, I could take one of the sentences from the majority in this section and write an essay about it. I don't feel like this is warranted in a mere blog post, though, so I'll leave those details to you.
~~~
And there you have it, folks. Intelligence increases, the culture changes (probably for the worse), less people join, and other stuff.
To cap this off, there's one more observation I'll make. The need for verbal ability and creativity is a magnet for people with high-functioning autism, especially Asperger syndrome. Such traits have very strong positive correlations with those disorders. To the layman who still participates in freestyle battles that are no different from those of 1980, the idea of a battler with Asperger may seem strange to the point of heresy; nevertheless, it is the future. |
| The laws of thermodynamics, perpetual motion machines, and the burden of proof |
Date Posted: 07-03-2015 at 09:37 PM - Comments (0) |
Since this is a post discussing scientific and technical matters, I think it behooves me to begin this by stating that I have no education, either formal or informal, in the subjects discussed below. Because of this, I will not be going into significant detail about them; rather, I will merely be applying simple logic and common sense to some very basic, nontechnical scientific concepts in the hopes of enlightening the reader about something that has lately caught my interest.
To begin, I'd like to summarize one of the most fundamental laws in physics, which will be the main focus of this post. This as as follows:
The First Law of Thermodynamics: The total energy of an isolated system remains the same forever. Consequently, because reality as a whole - encompassing all planets, universes, and dimensions within it - is by definition an isolated system, energy cannot be created, nor can it be destroyed; it can only be converted into other forms of energy.
This definition should be easily comprehended by the intelligent reader with the most rudimentary knowledge of physics. The point of mentioning it here is so that I can delve into a very controversial subject among Internet conspiracy theorists and crackpots: the idea of a perpetual motion machine of the first kind (perpetual motion machines of the second kind won't be discussed here, but most of the same ideas apply to them). Simply stated, a perpetual motion machine of the first kind (hereafter referred to as PMM) is a device that accepts an input of x amount of energy, and outputs y amount of energy, where y is a quantity greater than x, without drawing the difference between the two quantities from another source. Such a machine would be creating energy, and thereby violating the First Law of Thermodynamics.
The statement that a PMM cannot exist in reality is universally accepted among educated physicists. Nevertheless, many crackpots still argue about it; one common debating tactic is to point out that the "laws" of physics are merely theories of an elevated status, and, since physics - unlike mathematics or logic - is an empirical science, there can be no indisputable "law" of physics. The implied conclusion is that a PMM can exist in reality, even though it would be violating the First Law of Thermodynamics. Such an implication is doing a great disservice to the First Law of Thermodynamics, as this law serves as the underpinning of a vast amount of mathematical physics that has proven right time and time again, not to mention something effectively self-evident (though such discussions enter into the realm of philosophy, as opposed to science, and are thus quite obviously beyond the scope of this essay). While the First Law of Thermodynamics is not necessarily true, as nothing established by inductive reasoning can be definitely shown to be true, it is so well-established and its universal validity so thoroughly demonstrated that questioning its validity without a very convincing argument - and I mean a very convincing argument - leads to something that can be dismissed out of hand.
To illustrate this, suppose that I constructed a PMM that had its operations scrutinized by the greatest physicists and engineers in the world. None of these people could figure out where it was getting the additional energy in its output from. Would it then be valid to state that the First Law of Thermodynamics is not universally true? The answer is a resounding no! The reason for this is that the First Law of Thermodynamics is so well-established that it is actually more sensible to state that the additional energy is being converted or gathered by a process unknown to and inscrutable by modern physics.
In summary: Even the construction of a device that serves as an apparent counterexample to the First Law of Thermodynamics would not be sufficient to dismiss the Law altogether. With this in mind, the sheer amount of purported PMMs can be attributed to people and groups with various intentions, ranging from the merely misguided to the completely ignorant to the deliberate frauds. Unless we have reason to believe that the First Law of Thermodynamics is untrue by demonstrating that it is simply and unquestionably wrong, the realm of the PMM will forever be confined to that of the crackpot and the used-car salesman.
Thanks for reading. |
| The central point of the new/old heads debate |
Date Posted: 05-19-2015 at 03:52 PM - Comments (0) |
So, this stupid-ass thread where old vets and new "vets" come to find other members of their respective cliques and then jack each other off is (somehow) still ongoing - albeit in a zombie-like, shambling state. Today, with this blog entry, I'm going to offer a central thesis of discussion to wrap up the various arguments and figure out what the core point of disagreement is; but, first, I'm going to discuss some of the things that each side has said about the other.
The main criticism leveled against the old heads by the new heads is that their grasp of the fundamentals was bad. DaDDiO slanted his rhymes; reEFer spent too much time scheming and not enough time punching; Rican had god-awful wordplay; etc. Disregarding for a moment the hypocrisy of some of these statements if thought of as representing the group of new heads as a whole (e.g. if the "us" group includes Dissizit, you can't accuse the "them" group, which includes Rican, of using bad wordplay, without having made use of severe tu quoque.), I think that the fact that the new heads make a huge point of this while the old heads ignore it and say that the "bigger picture" of their skill/accomplishments overrides their deficiencies leads naturally to the following conclusion:
New heads and old heads have differing opinions about the skill of the old heads because the two groups' understanding of how battle rap "should" be done is fundamentally different.
Understand that. It's an important point - in fact, it is the main point of this essay.
I think that my defense of this position works best in a sort of Q&A format, so that's what I'm going to use for the remainder of this.
Q: When you say that the two groups have a different understanding of how battle rap should be done, what do you mean? How does their understanding differ?
A: It differs in that the two groups are split on which one of two factors of battle rap is the more important: the entertainment factor or the skill factor. The old heads place more value on entertainment; the new heads more on skill. One could also phrase this as saying that the old heads are more "artistic" or "intuitive," while the new heads are more "scientific" or "methodical." More practically, it makes sense to say that the new heads are more grounded in, and place more emphasis on the use of, "rules" for how battle rap should be written, while the old heads thought of these rules as being more flexible - general guidelines and not concrete commandments - and breakable if it increases the enjoyment that the audience derives from reading the verse.
Q: Why is this?
A: As battle rap continues to evolve, the best people will lead the way for its development. The best people will use their "technical" skill (i.e. scheming, complex punches) to demonstrate their superiority, but they won't make gigantic leaps that would put them completely above their audience. This has led us from the early traditions of flyting, to freestyle battles in urban areas, to simple multis and jabs, all the way up to the highly technical form of battle rap used today.
The increasing emphasis put on complexity and precision - i.e. making sure punches are well-thought-out, wordplays work both ways, and schemes are intricate and not slanted - is the result of every generation of leading battlers putting more emphasis on those aspects than the last one, just to show off. Other people then try to emulate them, leading to an overall increase in technical skill at the expense of "art."
Q: Why hasn't it always been that way since the beginning?
Good question. This development has always been around - even the internet text battles on GoldMic a decade ago, while less sophisticated than the battles of today, were still a huge step up in complexity from the very earliest days of battle rap, where two competitors would meet up on the street and throw freestyled insults at each other. That gradually developed into the style of battling we see today.
It takes more effort and talent to innovate than to copy. If you go to college and pursue a degree in mathematics, you might complete your studies in a few years. In the exams you have to pass to earn this degree, you might very well have to put your skills to use solving very complicated problems. However, those things that you learn while obtaining that degree took millenia for man's greatest intellects to develop. Does that mean that the mathematicians of the past were stupid? Of course not! It just means that they had less to build off of than today's mathematicians, and it's far easier to learn and use a mathematical theorem than to invent a mathematical theorem.
To make another analogy, consider for a moment that Isaac Newton did not come up with the theory of relativity. Albert Einstein did. Does that mean Isaac Newton was less intelligent or capable than Einstein? No; if anything, Newton was probably the much more intelligent and capable of the two! However, because Newton and Einstein were separated by a large span of time, Einstein had far more knowledge to work from than Newton did. Newton's great leaps were in his laws of motion, gravity, and invention of calculus; while any first-year undergraduate in a physics course would become familiar with all of these things, it took a great effort from one of history's greatest minds to invent them. Does that mean people back then were less intelligent? Of course not; if that same physics undergraduate were born in prehistoric times, they more likely than not never would have made any achievements at all.
The point of the above rambling is this: The battle rap we know today could not have been developed by one or a few person(s) over a short span of time. Rather, many people, over a long period, had to contribute their unique skills and insights for it to result. The middleweights and heavyweights of today would likely be no more "scientific" than those of yesteryear if they entered the scene during that time; similarly, if old greats had not started then but now, the current, methodical form of battle rap would have become theirs.
Q: Is this a good or bad thing?
No comment. Naturally, the answers you get will probably vary mostly depending on what timeframe the answerer started in, or was most active in. People tend to like and defend what they were familiarized with first.
Q: Can you give me an example of this?
DeNiro B Milk. Weird multies, huge lack of punches, but he told intricate, intriguing, and often hilarious stories. He broke all of the "rules" that you hear so much about, but the rules weren't as set in stone then; and, in any case, nobody gave a fuck. He was unique and entertaining, so he became a legend. But if someone else doing the exact same thing appeared today, that person probably wouldn't do too well in the eyes of the public.
~~~
I leave all of the above statements and comments to the criticism of those more knowledgeable about the history of the site than myself. This essay is merely intended to be a collection of some of my thoughts on the matter, and is hardly exhaustive.
Thanks for reading. |
| About Me |
Date Posted: 05-12-2015 at 10:29 PM - Comments (0) |
Joined LB: January 2014
Released to manufacturing: Sometime in the late 90s
Battles in: Text, mostly, maybe a little bit of godawful audio here and there
Things I am proud of: Beating Black Book, beating Dave and Babylon at typeracer, becoming the world's only autistic rap savant, surviving life in the hardest majority-white suburbs in North Florida, hating myself and wanting to die
Things I am not proud of: Not getting as many votes as Babylon for the 2014 Most Intelligent Member award, my voice, not being able to recite al-Fatihah properly, losing chess games to NOBLE
Influences: Doms and Mark Grist got me into rap battling; I realize they suck (in the grand scheme of things) now, but I have eternal respect for them anyway
LBers I respect (incomplete list): Lockhart, Rant, Babylon, NOBLE, Subreal, Manhattan, ILLoKWENT, Skizzo
LBers I disrespect (incomplete list): Bnas/ILL4, Proctologist, Godbody, Row
My best achievements: Being a contender for the LBT title, beating Black Book in round 1 of the concept tourney, getting into the FVC for some reason |
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